Jimmie spends the last of her own money on some home improvements she thinks will make our lives easier when she’s gone. She gets Uncle Frantz to install storm windows upstairs, and she buys us a large freezer to keep in the cellar so we won’t have to run over to use Aunt Essie’s freezer—the freezer in our Frigidaire is very small, and doesn’t keep things frozen. Daddy lets Jimmie get my hair cut short so it will be easier for me to manage.
Almost as an afterthought, Jimmie gives me a pamphlet to read about menstruation. She doesn’t want me to be surprised by it, the way she was when she was thirteen and thought she was bleeding to death.
By the end of summer, the strong, sturdy woman, Jimmie—who used to be my mother—seems to have slipped away and vanished down some long hospital corridor. The woman who comes home for the last time is emaciated, her remaining breast just a flap of skin. This woman’s voice is meek; her eyes glisten with the dull glow of pain masked by morphine. Aunt Essie comes over every day to tend to her sister and bathe her, leaving her body smelling of a tainted rose fragrance.
Some days, when Jimmie is too sick, I’m not allowed to go into her sick room. “Your mother doesn’t want you to see her the way she is today,” Aunt Essie tells me.
The last time I get to talk with Jimmie, she is propped up in bed. She has a weak smile today. Her arm, stretching out to me across the sheets, is so thin now. But when her hand grips mine, it is strong. “There are so many things I want to tell you, Lissa. I’m so sad I won’t get to see you grow up. I’m so proud of you and Spence.”
I’m crying now, but very softly. “I love you, Mommy. I will miss you.”
“And, Lissa, always take care of your daddy and your brother.”
I nod, and say, “Mommy, if I talk to you after you die, and if you can hear me, will you answer me back?”
“Yes, I will,” she says. Those are the last words I hear her say.
One quiet Sunday evening near the end of August, when I am still twelve, right before I start eighth grade, a shadow lady who used to be my mother fades into a coma and dies of heart failure in her own mother’s bed upstairs.
Daddy picks out a beautiful mahogany coffin for Jimmie. It’s the most expensive one, but Daddy says, “Nothing but the finest for Jimmie.”
The funeral is held at the local Methodist church. Jimmie is just fifty years old. She is the youngest sibling, and the first to die. Her brothers bear her casket, and she is buried in her family’s plot, right next to Grandma Magda and Granddaddy Friedrich.
Jimmie’s relatives and friends come up to me and tell me how sorry they are for me. I know I will miss Jimmie, but I’m not sure why they are so sorry for me.
I ask Daddy if he is going to be buried next to Jimmie, and he says, “No. There’s not enough room there. I’d have to be stacked—one coffin on top of the other, and I don’t want to be stacked.”
The day after Jimmie’s funeral, Zora Clay comes knocking at our back door. She’s carrying a baking dish covered with a striped dish towel. It’s raining, and she wears one of those fold-out plastic rain hats tied under her chin.
“Hello there, Lissa. I was doing my baking this morning, and figured you folks might like a nice fresh peach cobbler, what with your mother gone now and all. How are you making out here? I reckon this is right hard on your father, being so old and all.” Zora is a plain farm woman, with coarse skin and a mole beside her nose. I stare at her gold tooth when she smiles, take the dish from her, and say thank you to be polite, as Jimmie has taught me to do whenever somebody gives me something. Zora seems to be trying to peep around me to see inside the house, but I stand my ground. I don’t let her in, even though it’s raining outside. Daddy doesn’t like me to let anybody into the house, and he’s warned me before that Zora Clay is a gossip, with a nose too much in other people’s business. I am also worried that I’m not keeping the house clean enough. I don’t want her to see this morning’s dirty dishes, which are still sitting, unwashed, in the kitchen sink.
“How’s your little brother taking all this?”
“He’s okay.” I don’t correct her and say that Spence is my big brother. A lot of people make that mistake.
“Well, I hope you enjoy the cobbler. I’ll come back sometime and get the dish.”
“Okay. Thank you.” And I shut the door in her face.
A few days later, Zora comes back.
“Did you like that cobbler? Just stopped by to get my dish back.”
She’s caught me by surprise. “Oh! I’ll be right back.” I close the door in her face and run into the pantry. The last piece of cobbler is still sitting on a shelf in the dish cabinet. I grab the baking dish, dump out that last piece on a clean plate, and give the baking dish a quick wash.
“Here’s your dish.” I can see Zora looking at the dish, and I’m embarrassed it’s still sticky around the edges with baked-on pieces of peach. But Zora doesn’t say anything about the dirty dish. Instead, she starts talking to me all in a rush about her daughter-in-law, Faye.
“You know, that woman is never satisfied. Crazy as a loon, and keeps pushing Cory to build and sell more houses so he can spend more money on her. Spends all afternoon watching old movies on TV. Saw The Bishop’s Wife with Loretta Young and Cary Grant, and now she wants my son to build her an ice skating rink behind the house so they can ice skate together this winter in the moonlight. Cory says to me the other day, ‘Mom, old man Brenner’s putting that tenant farm of his up for sale. It’s an opportunity I can’t pass up. Going to take out a loan and buy that place. Seize the day! I have a feeling it’s meant to be. Going to build high-end houses that’ll attract professionals from the city, who want to move out near horse country and don’t mind spending some money to do it. Going to call it Country Manor Estates after My Lady’s Manor. And the roads that run through it will all have horse-country names, like Equestrian Way and Fox Hunt Lane.’”
Finally, Zora just shakes her head, saying, “I’m worried about that boy,” and heads back home across Cory’s Ridge.
Paloma calls me when she finds out that Jimmie died. School starts this week. “I guess you won’t be coming back to school right away,” Paloma says.
“Why not? No, I’m coming. I have to start school on time, don’t I?”
“Well, sometimes people take a little time off after things like this happen.”
“No, I won’t be taking any days off.” I’m surprised. I didn’t think I was supposed to miss school unless I was really sick.
“You’re very brave, Lissa,” Paloma tells me, “to come back to school and all—right after your mother died.”
“No. It doesn’t mean I’m brave,” I tell Paloma. “This is just what happened. It’s the way things are. I don’t have any other choice, do I?”
When I start back to school on the first day, Paloma looks me up and down, and asks me, “Who’s fixing your meals now that your mother’s gone?”
“I am,” I say.
“Yeah?” She looks a little skeptical. “What did you have for dinner last night?”
“Oh, you mean supper. Muffins.”
“Just muffins?”
“Yes. I like muffins. They’re pretty easy to fix.”
“What about vegetables and meat? Are you getting enough protein? Do you drink milk?”
“Sometimes we have bacon for breakfast on the weekend, and I put milk in my coffee.”
“Coffee! Why do you drink coffee?”
“I love the taste of coffee. I’ve been drinking coffee since I was four. I never did like the taste of milk. My mother got me to drink milk by flavoring it with coffee. And over the years, the coffee got more and more, and the milk got less and less.”
“Well, what about orange juice? You should drink orange juice every day with your breakfast. If you don’t get enough vitamin C, you can get scurvy. If you don’t get enough protein, you can get kwashiorkor. If you don’t get enough calcium and vitamin D, you can get rickets and osteomalacia. You look malnourished to
me.”
I am pretty skinny. And it’s embarrassing when the science teacher posts all our weights on a chart in the front of class. I’m the lowest-weight girl in eighth grade, except for one other girl, who is very short. I look up malnutrition in the encyclopedia, and I don’t like the pictures it shows. I try to take some of Paloma’s advice. I do the best I can.
That fall, after school, I begin to spend long hours alone on the tire swing, clinging to the familiar old rubber. I watch as two more new houses go up, on what used to be Mr. Brenner’s tenant farm across the road. A new builder has started work on Cory Clay’s second housing project. The Country Manor Estates sign looms large just about a hundred feet from the front of our house. It casts a shadow across our mailbox. Foxtail grass and chicory push through the bluestone gravel in our driveway, untended by Jimmie’s sickle.
One day, I wind the tire swing tight on its rope, tuck my feet up inside the rim, close my eyes, and let the tire spin quickly down. I open my eyes mid-spin to see Spence, blurred as he comes down the front steps toward me.
I imagine I hear my brother saying, “You told Mommy, didn’t you? Lonny’s going to be mad.” But really, he says nothing at all. I’m hearing echoes of something Spence said a long time ago.
Suddenly, I want to go very far away, to run across an open field, grow tiny in the distance, and disappear forever into dark and silent woods, into once upon a time. I cling more tightly to the tire’s warm black rubber, kick off my tennis shoes, push hard with my feet, and swing high.
I curl my toes, then stretch them out toward the maple branches. Even though I keep my eyes shut, the vision comes back, long past, but vivid.
In between circus acts, on one of those washed-out summer afternoons when I am seven, lucky seven, Spence, my own brother, succumbs to Lonny’s threats and bullying. Squatting opposite me behind the disc harrow, Spence touches—just barely touches—his most private self to mine, while Lonny watches through a peephole in the barn wall.
I never told my mother. At the time, it seemed too awful to tell. And I must never tell my daddy.
Later, much later, I will come to understand that more than the act itself, the reactions I feared from those around me made it all seem worse, much worse, than it actually was.
But for now, I feel the swing going higher and higher. Spence is pushing me. I open my eyes just in time to see him running under me, pushing and lifting the swing over his head. He gives a blood-curdling rebel yell.
I scream, “Don’t!” just as my feet strike a branch. Down comes a shower of maple leaves, as bright and golden as the new moon that, in my innocence, I had wanted to look for; but these leaves are fallen, and they will soon be dead.
Spence runs off, up behind the corn crib, where he habitually goes to think. He paces vigorously around and around an oval path he has worn in the grass, talking aloud to himself from time to time, gesturing with bursts of energy as he ponders ways to conquer outer space.
By dragging my feet, I bring the swing to a halt. I put my shoes back on, run to catch up with Spence, and begin to pace behind him on his “thinking” path.
“What are you thinking about, Spence?”
“Why don’t you make like a tree—and leave?” says Spence. He likes to be alone when he’s thinking.
I give up trying to talk with Spence and run into the house.
“Daddy, is there such a thing as a new moon?” He’s sitting in his armchair, nodding in front of the TV set, which is blaring at full-volume.
“Daddy,” I repeat a little louder, and climb onto his lap. He wakes with a start, runs his tongue over his lips to moisten them, and hugs me close to him.
He tugs at my ears and says, “There’s my little squirrel-ears, come home to her nest.”
“Is there such a thing as a new moon?”
“A what?” he asks me, and cups his hand behind his left ear. He’s told me the story many times of how the doctor gave him quinine as a child to treat malaria, how it left him hard of hearing.
“A new moon,” I shout into his ear. His eyes have begun to water and he dabs at them with his dirty white handkerchief.
“There’s only one moon,” he tells me. “The same old moon. And there’s a man in the moon. They talk of going to the moon someday with their rocket ships. But they oughtn’t to do it. They oughtn’t to go shooting their missiles and their Sputniks into that old man in the moon. He never did anybody any harm. Leave him alone. That’s what I say.”
Tears run down both of Daddy’s cheeks, and some of them spill onto my face. I snuggle closer to him. I run my fingernails lightly up and down over his stubbly chin whiskers, the way I did when I was little. And here I stay for a while, believing that my daddy is crying for all of us, and for the moon.
The weeds grow high in Jimmie’s vegetable gardens until the frost hits. The house is quieter now, without Jimmie in it. Aunt Essie doesn’t come over any more. None of Jimmie’s relatives are invited over anymore. Daddy doesn’t like visitors or strangers—other than customers—coming into our house. And the customers he lets into his office directly through the side door.
Jimmie was friendly, and she always liked people. But now, Daddy tells me, “I used to like people too, Lissa. But when you get to be as old as I am, and you’ve seen as many things as I have, you might not like people, either. The older I get, the less faith I have in human nature. I don’t trust people anymore.”
For a while, every night before I go to sleep, I try to talk to Jimmie about all this. “Hello, Jimmie. Mommy? Are you there? Can you hear me?” I say.
I do this night after night, week after week, but Jimmie never answers back. And then, one night, when I try to picture Jimmie in my mind, I can’t do it. I can’t see her face anymore. It makes me want to cry.
I miss her so! I panic. I go up to the attic, where Jimmie’s clothes and most of her things are stored, and dig out an old framed photo of her. Grandma Magda’s black metal dress form appears to rise from the shadows under the steep slope of the roof, looming over me, terrorizing me.
Years ago, I drew Grandma’s face with crayon on a brown paper lunch bag, and stuck the bag, like a head, on the neck of her dress form in the attic. Now, I give Grandma’s form a strong spin and race down the attic stairs, clutching Jimmie’s photo. If I can make it down the stairs, turn off the light, and close the attic door before Grandma Magda stops spinning, I will be safe!
I put Jimmie’s photo on the dresser across from my bed, and look at it every day to keep my memory of her alive.
A couple of times, I dream that Jimmie didn’t really die, and that she is still alive somewhere—sick and dying in a hospice. In the dream, I am so sorry that she’s been there all this time, and I didn’t even know it. She must think I have forgotten her; that thought makes me frantic! I search and search for the phone number for her room. Finally, I find the number and try to call her at the hospice, but I’m never able to get through to her. It’s a wrong number, or I get a busy signal, or the phone just keeps ringing, and no one answers.
After that, the weeks seem to blur on for a while. Spence draws into himself more and more. Daddy looks so sad and lonely.
Then on Friday, November 22, 1963, an act of violence jars me and leaves a permanent scar on the whole world’s consciousness. It’s just six days before Thanksgiving when the brown wooden PA box at the top of the classroom wall switches on for an announcement. John F. Kennedy has been assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Our handsome young president is dead. Teachers gather in the hallway. My French teacher is crying.
Then come days of TV images that never fade—a pillbox hat, a bloodstained pink suit, a black-veiled widow leaning down, whispering to her three-year-old son. A little boy’s farewell salute to his father. Throngs of mourners, a flag-draped casket rolling past, and a riderless horse with back-facing boots in the stirrups. Even when the TVs are silenced for the night, that primal presidential drumbeat goes on, marking time.
Not long after that comes
a time when, right across the road, construction ceases mid-house at Country Manor Estates, where the sun still sets behind the pointed hemlocks. We hear through the Grangerville grapevine that Cory Clay, deep in debt, has put a bullet through his head. Faye has to be sedated, and is taken to Sheppard Pratt. Around here, Country Manor Estates comes to be known as Faye’s Folly.
CHAPTER EIGHT
PUBERTY INTERRUPTED
IN eighth grade, when I begin to read Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth with the rest of my class, I come across a passage that describes what happens in bed on a wedding night. At our house, sex has never been spoken about openly—either before or after Jimmie dies. This passage startles me, and I make the mistake of reading it out loud to Daddy. He grabs the book from my hands, goes out back by the grape arbor, tosses the paperback on the trash heap, and lights it with a match. Watching from the pantry window, I see flames like obscene orange tongues licking at The Good Earth. Soon, it is just a smoldering heap of ashes.
Daddy writes a note to my teacher:
Dear Mrs. Comey,
I do not condone my daughter reading The Good Earth. It is a
filthy novel.
Yours truly,
Stouten R. Power
The next day, I wait until the end of class to give the note to Mrs. Comey. I thrust it at her across her desk and rush out of the classroom, too embarrassed to look at her.
Later that week, Mrs. Comey asks me to stay for a few minutes after class. She gives me a different book to read, a collection of classic short stories.
“Lissa, I’m going to have you read this book while the other students read The Good Earth. You will be expected to listen to the class discussions on The Good Earth, but I won’t ask you to participate in them. I will be giving you a separate exam on the stories in this collection. Your exam will include questions about the short stories you read, plus one or two essay questions on The Good Earth. You should be able to grasp what you need to know for the exam by reading all the stories in this book and by listening to the class discussions.”
At the Far End of Nowhere Page 10
