by Han Nolan
I climbed out of the van and headed toward the chair, rehearsing what I had planned to say to Mam. I clenched my teeth and told myself to just blurt it out. Just accuse her as soon as I saw her. Tell her that I knew the truth, call her a liar.
Then I saw Mam coming out of the woods and I braced myself, folding my arms across my chest, my feet wide apart She saw me, but she didn't quicken her pace, didn't wave or even look happy to see I'd come home safely, and I felt all the energy and the tension that had expanded inside my body suddenly collapse, leaving me tired, more tired than I'd ever felt in my life. My arms fell by my side, too heavy to hold themselves up anymore.
I hadn't realized Jerusha had come up behind me until I heard her speaking in my ear.
"Mam thinks she's going to die," she said.
I turned my head and saw Jerusha nod. "She's sure this pregnancy will kill her."
I turned back to Mam. She had paused to gaze up at a bat that had just swooped past her head.
I took notice of the bat and then returned to Mam, to the stranger with a baby growing inside her and a self-proclaimed death sentence hanging over her. How dare she? Grandma Mary, Pap, and I had spent a lifetime fearing every time she got sick that this was it, this was the one, she was going to die on us, and now she was planning on it. She was planning on dying having Mike's baby. The whole idea was too much for me. She wasn't going to die. She just had a guilty conscience.
I watched her standing out on the lawn, following the bat's flight, ignoring me, too guilty even to face me. My desire to speak with her and accuse her of lying to me had vanished. What was the use? She didn't care about how 1 felt. She didn't care about me. I realized there was nothing for me to do but turn and walk away.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
THAT SPRING AND summer, Mam and I stopped talking to each other. It wasn't something we had agreed on. It just happened. At first I felt too angry to speak, and too confused by her behavior. Why was she living outside? What was going on with her? And where was Dr. Mike? What did it mean that he wasn't coming around anymore? Then later I felt too depressed to speak. Depressed because I had figured Mam would notice my silence and seek me out, try to make things up to me, explain herself, but she didn't She answered my silence with a silence of her own.
No one else seemed to notice. I felt sure they thought everything was fine between us. Mam stayed outside and I stayed inside, both of us busy, both of us using the others like a wall and shield to keep from having to deal with each other, to even notice each other existed. I did this on purpose, suddenly making extra efforts to fit in, to be one of the crowd. Larry had taken a second job as a waiter in a high-class restaurant to help pay for his house-building course, so I took over the job as head cook, and the others would often gather in the kitchen while I prepared the food. They'd sit at the table or lean against the counter and talk to one another and to me. They said they loved coming home and smelling something wonderful cooking, they couldn't resist coming into the kitchen, and so I made sure I always had something on the stove or in a Crock-Pot, a soup or stew, that could be simmering all day until I got home to take over my duties. Even if I got home late, I could find them in there, and often someone would be sampling the dish and then, seeing me, would lower the lid and give me an innocent look, backing away from the stove. I'd just smile and get to work, pleased that they were waiting for me and not outside with Mam.
I wanted her to know I was fitting in. I wanted to hurt hey with the knowledge that everybody wanted my comfort food. I wanted her to be there when Jerusha and I set up our chess game out on the porch table and when Leon and I shot baskets, when we played one-on-one. I wanted her to know that her silence didn't bother me at all, and anytime we did happen to be in the same place at the same time, I made sure she saw what a great time I was having. I talked louder, laughed harder, always keeping that wall of others between us, always so, so busy. I had to study for final exams. I had my jobs in the computer lab and the school office. I found it easy not speaking to Mam, and yet all my busy-ness did not block out my awareness of her. I watched her more than ever. I knew where she was, what she was doing, who she was with, more than I ever had, and I noticed she, too, had become extra-busy. She lived outside, just as she had said she would, sleeping out on the lawn each night and escaping to the porch when it rained. She even had Jerusha buy her groceries that would keep outdoors and that she could use to make easy meals.
I learned from Aunt Colleen that Mam had declared she didn't want to miss another moment of the life around her. She felt that by living outside, by studying the soil or a blade of grass, by watching the ants working their way across the bottom porch step each morning, she could slow down time, she could soak up every last bit of life before it was over.
She began working on the wildflower garden that Bobbi and Pap had planned that past autumn, digging up the lawn and bringing home plants of all kinds from the Center.
Pap tried to act as helper, but Mam wouldn't let him do much of anything. He wanted all the flowers to be yellow, and he wanted the tall flowers in the front and the tiny ground cover ones hidden in the back. He wanted foreign plants that he'd seen pictured in a book instead of the native ones Mam insisted on planting.
"I hate you today, Erin," Pap often would say, throwing down his trowel in frustration and storming off. I saw his frustration as an opportunity to get Pap on my side. I'd call him in to bake a loaf of bread for dinner or to sing with me while I cooked or to join the gang in the living room, anything to make him want to stay inside with me. Then I came up with the idea of having a garden of my own. Why not? Let Mam stop me, if she wanted to. I created a garden for Pap, and we planted only tall yellow flowers, and Pap hugged me and bragged to Mam that he had his own garden now, so "Na, na!" And I felt somehow that this was a victory for my side.
Then Mam invited the students from her classes on a field trip to the house to help her work on the garden, and they arrived in a couple of vans and spread out over the yard, planting flowers, vegetables, and even a few trees and bushes. I knew Pap felt jealous of the others, and I felt sorry for him that afternoon when I saw him dashing from one end of the yard to the other, claiming that they were on his property and those were his tomato plants and his daisies. "Hey, that's mine!" he'd exclaim, and then with a hurt expression look to Mam and say, "Erin, that's mine they're using now."
Mam made a halfhearted attempt at appeasing Pap by handing him back the garden tools Bobbi had given him. But Pap wanted more, he wanted them off his property. Mam flopped down in her chair, bowing her head in her hands. She remained that way until Aunt Colleen came along and put some order into the activities, placing Pap on a team with two others and putting him in charge.
Everyone agreed that there was something strange going on with Mam. She wandered off on long hikes through the woods or went down along the towpath or out to Washington Crossing State Park to wander through deeper woods and Bowman's Hill Wildflower Garden.
I said to Aunt Colleen once, "If Mam really thinks she's going to die, why isn't she spending more time with us? Don't people who are dying usually do that?" Really what I wondered was why, if she thought she was dying, she didn't try making up with me. Why didn't she try to set things straight?
Aunt Colleen said, "Oh, your mother's just nervous. She got this way when she was pregnant with you, too. Don't worry, she's not dying."
"Oh, believe me, I'm not worrying," I said, rocking back in my chair. "I just think she's acting awfully strange for a dying person, all this living outside. It's like she doesn't even want to be around us anymore."
Jerusha had come into the room by then, and she agreed with me. "She's giving us the brush-off, all right"
Aunt Colleen waved her hand in front of her face, dismissing our notions. "You've got to understand how it is for her. You know, JP. Your mam spent her whole childhood cooped up indoors because she was too sick to play outside. I remember she used to say that if she ever got well she'd go outside an
d never come in again. I guess she's living out her old fantasy. Your mam's not like the rest of us, never has been, much as I've tried to change that I think she equates the indoors with sickness and hospitals, and fresh air and sunshine with health and vigor." Aunt Colleen smiled at us and patted my hand. "And don't worry, she's not really giving you the brush-off, she's just concentrating on the baby, that's all She'll be back to normal after the baby's born, you'll see."
"I told you, I'm not worried, but if you ask me, it's more like she's concentrating on herself," I said, and Aunt Colleen nodded.
"Same thing."
So Mam and I didn't see each other much at all, never spoke, and yet I thought about her all the time. I felt her absence as an even greater presence than that of all the others gathered in the kitchen around me each evening. To me, her absence was like a hot spot in the room, this space she should have been taking up. When we ate dinner, this hot spot hovered over the dining table and it was as if we all had to talk around it, pretending we didn't notice it was there. When I played basketball with Leon it filled the yard behind me, whether Mam stood behind us or not.
When I studied, hunched over my desk, memories of her dancing to Mozart with Pap in the old house, twirling in and out of the room, disrupted my work even more than it had done back then. And late at night, when I crawled into bed, exhausted, the hot spot hovered close, keeping me awake, alert, stirring up more memories, drawing me to my window to lode out over the lawn and find her dark form sitting up in the lounge chair or stretched out on the ground.
By the time school let out for the summer, our household was in the midst of yet another transition. Without telling any of us, Jerusha had applied to the university, for pre-med, and had gotten in for the summer term. She left us to live on campus and only visited on occasional weekends. I was surprised how much I missed her. After she left, and after I had taken over her job as waiter at the Railroad Restaurant, where everybody still talked about her, I realized she had become my best friend. I wanted her back home. She belonged with us, at home.
Larry and Ben had planned to hitch a ride to Maine with some friends toward the end of August, but then Mam decided that with the Center closed for a few weeks it would be the perfect time for her and Pap to visit her brother, John, at the monastery up in Portland. Then Aunt Colleen said she wanted to go, too, and invited her leprechaun friend to join them. So they all piled into the van and off they went, shrinking the household down to just five people.
The place felt deserted. I wandered the house, moving from room to room. Jerusha's cello stood in the living room like a dateless man at a dance. Larry's poetry books, his last box of cigarettes (he had finally quit smoking), and his mime costume were left in a pile in the parlor, where Aunt Colleen and the leprechaun's sewing project had been abandoned.
The leprechaun had come back into Aunt Colleen's life after she'd reassured him it was over with her husband. He started coming to the house again, spending his evenings teaching Aunt Colleen how to sew. They had set up the sewing machine and cut out the pattern in the parlor. The half-finished tennis dress lay on a table next to a box of pins and several spools of white thread, and the sheets of the pattern used to cut out the material still lay spread out on the floor.
Pap's plants sat on top of the piano in order from biggest to smallest, and he'd left the vacuum cleaner out on the rug, its hose set to suck up Aunt Colleen's paper pattern the second it got turned on.
Each room in the house was cluttered with clothes and shoes and other objects left behind, and still the place felt empty, as if everything had been cleared out. The house felt ridiculously large with only the five of us left.
Leon came into the kitchen one evening when I was tossing together something for us to eat, looked around the deserted kitchen, and said to me with his eyebrows raised, "And then there were none." He laughed, but I didn't find it funny. I remembered the Agatha Christie mystery Bobbi had brought home with that tide. It was the story about ten houseguests who were killed off, one by one. That's what this felt like. It felt like a death, and memories of losing Grandma Mary just a little more than a year ago kept pushing their way into my mind, and despite the clutter of thoughts, I felt as emptied out inside as the house felt to me on the outside. When Susan joined a folksinging group and left to tour with them in Pittsburgh, I panicked, deciding everyone was going to take off until there was just me, alone.
One afternoon I went out onto the porch and found Mam's binoculars, her sketchpad, and several familiar old field guides sitting on the checkerboard table. I sat down and picked up the binoculars. I stared out at the yard, at Larry's cabin, at the woods. I tried to see if I could see the road through them. I couldn't. I set the binoculars down and picked up a guide to birds and flipped through it, then closed it and squeezed it in my hands.
I didn't care about whose baby she carried, or whether or not she had lied. I wanted Mam back. Larry had said Mam and Dr. Mike had agreed to go their separate ways, but I didn't even care about that anymore. I didn't care about any of it. I just wanted her back.
I wanted everybody back. I wanted chaos. Mam had been right, stagnation was death, and I wanted life, I wanted chaos. I was ready to let go of the old life with Grandma Mary. I wanted the house filled with people. I missed Bobbi marching into my room and yelling at me for something trivial like leaving the toilet seat up in the bathroom. I missed Larry and his English accent, and Ben and his mime act. I missed the bodies asleep on the floor when I came down each morning and Jerusha eating off my plate at night. I missed staying up late with Pap and watching the Nativity set. I missed the poetry and the music and the loud voices, and I missed Mam. I wanted to hike through the woods with her, go fishing, make dinner for her, take her back to the creek and have her stand in the water with her arms up and feel the water running through her body. I wanted her to wear my boots when she couldn't find her own. I wanted her to need me, to want me around again.
I remembered when she won the house the reporter had asked Mrs. Levi why she picked Mam's essay over all the others, and she had said how she liked the Harpo Marx line Mam had used about wanting to see a face in every window when she came home each day. I wanted that, too. I wanted to see a face in every window, and I wanted one of the faces to be Mam's.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I WOKE UP Saturday morning to an empty house. Harold, Leon, and Melanie had already gone to work. I couldn't stand the quiet. I didn't know what to do with myself. Nothing seemed worth doing. I picked up a book and tried to read, but I couldn't concentrate. I made myself a huge bowl of cereal, mixing four different brands together the way I liked it, then ate only two bites before I lost interest. I started out for a walk in the woods, but the birdcalls sounded so lonely and depressing I turned back and went inside. I went into the parlor and turned the vacuum cleaner on with my foot. The suction wasn't strong enough to take up the dress pattern on the floor, after all. I turned it on and off a few times and then left it on.
I ran my fingers over the piano keyboard, then sat down and shouted over the noise of the vacuum, "I will now play for you; please be quiet." Then I lifted my hands and crashed them down on the keyboard. I smiled. I did it again, then again. Then I announced, "I will now sing for you." I sang "My Darling Clementine" and banged away on the piano, striking any note, any chord. I sang "I've Been Working on the Railroad" and "You're a Grand Old Flag." I belted out the songs. I pounded the piano. Nothing had felt this good to me in a long time. I felt the tension leave my shoulders. I felt my chest expand and I noticed my breathing suddenly, as if I had just begun to breathe after months of holding my breath. I sang "From the Halls of Montezuma" and "Marching to Pretoria," and then for Bobbi, "Roll on, Columbia, Roll On." I loved it. I loved acting like Pap. I felt as if I had discovered a great secret, a secret Pap had been keeping all to himself. I could picture him laughing at us all because we didn't know what he knew. We didn't know how easy it was to be happy, how simple it could be.
; I jumped up from the piano, turned off the vacuum, and still singing went up to Mam and Pap's room, and one by one, carried the Nativity pieces back out on the roof. When I had arranged them the way Pap liked them, with the Three Wise Men closest to the Baby Jesus, and hooked it all up and plugged it in, I stood back, lifted my arms up, and declared to the sky, "I am the Three Wise Man!" I shouted it louder, "I am the Three Wise Man! Ho, ho, ho, I am the Three Wise Man!"
I stood holding my hands out, lifting my face to the sky, and I felt such a longing for Pap and Mam that the words "Wise Man" broke in my throat. I swallowed and stared at the clouds. I stared until my arms, still out, began to ache. I lowered them, but in that silence, watching the sky, a thought came to me. It was more than a thought, it was an urge, a feeling as if a hand were pushing me along, and a voice were whispering, You have to go to Maine. I didn't know where the urge came from, but I felt overcome with the need to go, to see Mam and Pap.
I started to sit down, to think things through. I wanted to decide if this was a good idea, plan when and how, figure out where the urging was coming from, but then I stopped myself. "Just go," I said. "For once, just go. Be spontaneous."
I packed a suitcase, took the money I was once again saving to buy a computer with out of the bank, and called Jerusha, who borrowed a friend's car and drove me to the airport. I had never flown before, so Jerusha came with me to the counter to purchase a ticket and led me through the airport to the boarding gate. We didn't speak at all once we sat down to wait for the plane, but we held hands and sat in the comfortable silence of a close friendship. When the call came for the passengers to board the plane, we stood up and hugged each other. I hesitated, wondering if I were acting silly heading off to Maine, but Jerusha pushed me forward and said, "Go on," and I left, glancing back only once to see Jerusha still waving at me.
