What Girls Learn

by Karin Cook

  “Back home to Atlanta,” he said. He crossed the room and squatted down in front of us. He bent one knee down to the ground and balanced his hand on the edge of the bed. “Your memories of her are here with each other. Mine are there, where we grew up.” He blinked, his eyes wide and red. “You are so lucky to have each other. Nothing can change that.” There was a long silence. “Can you forgive me?”

  I looked away. Elizabeth forgave him immediately. I felt a pressure to respond, but held onto my silence, thinking of those strange, confusing nights. When I glanced back, his eyes were still on me. I said nothing.

  Samantha called and cried quietly into the phone. “I can’t believe it,” she said again and again. Her words sounded stilted and awkward. It was as if she was talking about some distant tragedy. There wasn’t room in my sadness for hers. She wanted me to know that her mother was making some casseroles for us. The mention of Ivy filled me with longing. I imagined their kitchen, Ivy bustling from the counter to the oven and Samantha folding ingredients into a Pyrex dish. Samantha asked if I wanted to go to a movie? Did I want to get some ice cream? I hated the simplicity of her suggestions. I didn’t know if I could ever see her again.

  • • •

  Elizabeth woke up early to watch Lady Diana become a princess in front of millions of witnesses. I imagined the whole world with their TVs on—everyone, everywhere connected for that one moment. Elizabeth stared into the screen and studied the slow progression toward the altar. I had never seen her so absorbed. When the commentators broke in, I started to speak.

  “Shhh,” Elizabeth warned.

  “But nothing’s happening.”

  “Listen,” she whispered, “can’t you hear those bells?”

  A week after Mama died, Nick retrieved her ashes from the funeral home. Mrs. Teuffel warned that without the proper closure, Mama’s spirit wouldn’t be able to ascend to heaven. But, Nick disagreed. He felt certain that the bottom drawer of the mahogany dresser was enough of a final resting place.

  What disturbed Nick most was having reminders of Mama jump out at him. Her slippers, her hairbrush. The final straw had been the Weight Watchers mug that turned up at TransAlt. He suggested that we weed through her belongings and hold a yard sale. He started by cleaning out her desk, stuffing handfuls of check stubs, old pocket calendars, and envelopes into a giant leaf bag. They were the kind of belongings I might not have missed if I’d had the choice. But watching Nick plow carelessly through her things made me resentful.

  Elizabeth and I stood in the background, furious, waiting to catch sight of something important. I dove at snatches of her handwriting, rescuing some of her grocery lists and recipes. Mama had always written notes to us that would pop up in unexpected places—on the back of a fancy napkin in our lunches or slipped into a certain page of a textbook—so that the experience of opening a bag or turning a page could at any moment go from mundane to extraordinary. They were gestures that, at the time, meant we were never alone, even in the busyness of a lunchroom or the still of a reading lab, we were never without her.

  The morning of the yard sale, Uncle Rand packed his suitcase and left for Atlanta. Nick drove him to the airport. I woke to the slamming of the car doors, first the driver’s side and then the passenger’s, punctuating his departure. Feeling two ways about the same person gave me nowhere quiet to go inside. I walked onto the landing in time to see the town car turn out of the driveway.

  At the back of the lot, Jamie Sanders was already at work, applying wax in a circular motion to the TransAlt cars. He had come through the summer brown and sturdy. I felt as if I had missed August somehow, pale and squinting at the sun, like a tourist in a new, hot place. As I approached, he stood back from his work and rested solemnly by the bumper.

  “How are you?” he said, searching my face. His tone seemed formal. It made me feel as if I didn’t know him. We stood there awkwardly for a moment.

  I imagined a conversation in which he might ask about Mama’s last moments, offering me a chance to release my memory of the way her body turned on her—red swirls moving under her fingernails, her ear bent, dark as a plum from the oxygen tube. It was her hands that surprised me most, waxy and swollen, like squat candles. Nick had scooped some Vaseline from the jar by the bed and coated her ring finger. When the wedding band gave, he turned it over once in his palm and dropped it onto the table.

  Jamie cleared his throat and looked around for something to do. I felt suddenly private, realizing that I would be alone with my thoughts no matter who I shared them with. He picked up a rag and gestured to Mama’s station wagon. I could tell that he had worked hard. It shone all over, even on the rough terrain of the wooden panels.

  When Jamie turned his back, I popped the hood. I wanted to see the engine. Did Mama’s car look the same inside?

  A half dozen cars parked outside the house for the yard sale. Others drove by, slowing as they passed the backyard to check out our offerings. Some man took one look and marched back down the driveway. “No furniture,” he shouted to the other cars and a number of them pulled away.

  Two women wearing headbands and pearl earrings sorted quickly through Mama’s clothes, holding pieces up to their bodies, playing mirror for each other and trying to match handbags and shoes. They stopped short when they got to the box of headgear and bonnets. They ran their hands over the fabrics.

  “Whose clothes are these?” the taller one asked.

  “Our mama’s,” Elizabeth said.

  “Does she know you’re selling her things?”

  Elizabeth and I checked each other first and then nodded. I was surprised by how easily the lying came when we did it together.

  The TransAlt guys arrived late in the day, not so much to shop as to pay their respects. They hadn’t had an opportunity to express their condolences formally. They lined up on the other side of the picnic table and approached us one by one. They were so serious, I barely recognized them. Larry, who had been with TransAlt the longest, saved us all. He did a magic trick, pulling a quarter out from behind Elizabeth’s ear. We were children after all, he said. Too young to have a mother die. Magic was exactly what we needed.

  When Nick pulled up and got out of the car, the group quieted, half expecting him to say something, which he was unable to do.

  He walked up behind me and Elizabeth and placed his hands on each of our shoulders.

  “I miss her,” he whispered, gripping me tightly.

  It was the first he’d spoken of Mama since the day she died. I was relieved to hear him say it. I hadn’t known if I could love him before that.

  I watched as a breeze blew through Mama’s clothes, causing a flutter of fabric. I looked out over the yard at the familiar patterns. If I squinted hard and long enough, I could catch sight of Mama in every corner.

  PROCESSION

  Elizabeth was obsessed over Mama’s soul being in limbo. She had taken the ashes from the dresser drawer in Nick’s room and hidden the temporary receptacle under her bed. We disagreed about what to do next. I thought the ashes should be saved, placed somewhere private for posterity, maybe even buried. Elizabeth believed that scattering was the only thing that would set her spirit free.

  On the night before the first day of school, we studied the TransAlt map on my corkboard, looking for a resting place and spearing potential destinations with pushpins. As we searched for a spot, someplace that represented Mama, I realized that we were choosing our favorites, not hers. The parking lot at the mall, the beach, the woods behind the school.

  Elizabeth seemed distracted. I could tell that she was nervous about going to the junior high. She stuck a pin through the intersection where the school was located and asked, “What are you going to wear tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “nothing special, probably jeans.”

  “Yeah,” she said, climbing down from my bed and glancing at herself in the mirror, “I guess it doesn’t really matter.”

  But it did matter. Elizabeth had don
e her hair and makeup as a dress rehearsal for the next morning. She was painted in dark stripes of Mama’s Aztec blush and thick bands of electric blue eyeliner.

  “Your hair looks good,” I offered.

  “Really?” she said, her face now fully in the mirror. She patted the feathers at the sides of her head and looked back at me. “Yours could look like Princess Di’s,” she said, “if you grew your bangs.”

  “Thanks.”

  Elizabeth turned back to her reflection in the mirror. “Do you think I have on too much makeup?”

  “Go like this …” I said, pulling my hands into my sleeves and rubbing my own cheeks to demonstrate.

  Elizabeth gave me a dirty look, but I knew that underneath it she was grateful. She offered to swap clothes with me, making three trips between her room and mine, trying to convince me that she had something I wanted. I didn’t tell her that I had already planned my outfit. Instead, I turned to the back of my closet and dug through a garbage bag full of Mama’s clothes until I found an ivory shirt with lace on the collar. I tried it on and stood, wrinkled, in front of the mirror.

  Elizabeth watched me with interest. “What else did you save?”

  “Not that much,” I said, feeling suddenly protective of my stash. I didn’t want to share.

  Elizabeth gathered her clothes into a pile. “Fine,” she said, “be that way. See if I care.”

  That night, the echo of Mama’s absence was so loud I could not fall asleep. At midnight, Elizabeth came into my room with Mama’s ashes, holding the small copper can in the crook of her arm like a stuffed animal. Out my window, we could see her station wagon parked at the back of the lot, illuminated under the garage lights. Together we snuck down the outdoor staircase and slipped quietly into the cool upholstery of the front seat. I closed the door carefully, pulling it toward me until I heard it catch.

  We watched the house for signs of movement and when nothing stirred, we began searching the inside of the car. Elizabeth riffled through the glove compartment, while I dug under the seat. Between the two of us, we unearthed a leaky Bic pen, a Carnation breakfast bar, an old Chap Stick, and a roll of stamps. We swapped these treasures back and forth, assigning private meanings, and then collected them in the beverage holder.

  I reached under the mat until my hand passed over the rough edge of the keys. Elizabeth watched, wide-eyed and silent, as I inserted the key into the ignition. When the engine turned over, blasting the silence around us, we crouched low, our hot scalps pressed against each other in the seat. After a few minutes of stillness, I eased the car into reverse and inched back from between two town cars. I didn’t turn on the headlights until I got to the end of the driveway. There, the quiet, empty night pushed me forward. I turned left and accelerated, my confidence growing with each passing street.

  Elizabeth unfolded the map and began to navigate, directing me along the highlighted route. We drove first through town, past McNeary’s Pharmacy and the grocery store. The post office and the bank. It made no sense to me that the outside world could look the same when everything in mine had changed. A lone truck was parked on the vacant street in front of the pizza place. I swung wide around it and looked both ways before crossing the railroad tracks. At the bottom of the hill, I turned into the parking lot at the junior high.

  I parked in front of the school. Elizabeth lifted the copper can of ashes up from the floor and placed it on the armrest between us. We sat there for a moment, staring at the empty building, the hum of the engine engulfing our silence. I imagined the bus platform, busy with students in new shoes, some being dropped by their mothers, carrying bag lunches and calling out to their friends with confidence. Elizabeth and I seemed suddenly more alike in our loss. She must have been thinking the same thing.

  “I never really hated you,” she said, out of nowhere.

  Elizabeth’s words made it possible to imagine slipping into pieces of Mama’s clothes and moving, without her, into a strange world. A world where mothers are a sixth subject, more important than math, with articulations of infinity on every girl’s tongue.

  I moved the car into drive and eased over the speed bumps, causing the station wagon to rock gently. Elizabeth put her head down on the seat and whispered quietly to the ashes. Telling Mama her combination, the name of her homeroom teacher, and something about a new boyfriend that she didn’t let me hear. Then, she described some elaborate plan to cover the sides of the can with scented shelf paper and tape photographs over the top, so it would look like one of those photo cubes.

  “That way you can stay right in my room,” she said.

  I fell into a rhythm with the gas and the brake and could feel something shift inside me when finally I accelerated past twenty. An airy, open feeling of potential. Elizabeth suggested that I turn on the brights. Neither one of us could think of anything else to say so we sat quietly, with Mama between us on the seat, all the way up Cranbrook Avenue, down Connally Drive, until we got back home.

  MEMORY

  Dear Mama—

  Are there secrets where you are?

  Send me a sign.

  Love, Tilden

  Nobody knows this.

  I have written dozens of letters.

  At first, I sent them off with madeup streets and real zip codes with no return address. I used the large blue mailbox outside the post office and listened to make sure that the envelopes landed inside. Once the letters were out of my hands, it was easy to imagine that something might happen. That my life might be different. Anything was possible.

  I waited for signs. Occasionally, a piece of mail would arrive with Mama’s name on the label. It was never anything personal, just the usual catalogs and junk mail. But seeing her spelled out before me marked her existence. Made her real.

  Her name is still listed in the phone book. Nick said he left it there in case someone needed to reach us. Someone from our past. He never said who.

  Every so often, the phone rings and there is no answer on the other end.

  “Crank,” Elizabeth announces to no one and slams it back in the cradle.

  Something leaps inside me each time. I am a radar for coincidence. A bulb dims or surges out of nowhere. A window shade snaps and curls up on itself. The song in my head suddenly comes on the radio. She is everywhere and nowhere.

  In the distance, I will recognize the twist of her hair, a similar tilt of the head and search only to find a stranger. My hope evaporating. A mirage.

  I make promises. Both serious and silly. I will get an A, run faster, hold my breath the length of the pool. Do better. Be better …

  In all of this I am pushing against the promise of what is possible. From the outside it looks like excellence. Inside, I am racing against emptiness. No one has any idea how lonely I am.

  Elizabeth is more reckless than ever. Taking chance after chance. She will dance on the edge of danger. Risk arrest. Buy a pregnancy test. No matter what happens, she will appear unscathed. She holds the bravery for both of us. Sometimes, I fear she will leave me.

  Nick flickers back and forth between us, either busy in a clambering kind of way. Or else he is all echo. I am never sure what to expect. Absence or extravagance. His silence is loud. His noise, empty. He is more of a father than I have ever had. But no matter how hard he tries, a father is not a mother.

  Sometimes, I hate my friends. They shrink from the selves they once were. Shirk responsibility. Shed their mothers. I wish I could lose myself in a whirlwind of frosted lip gloss and hairspray. Drink a beer. Kiss a boy. I wish I could stop being so serious. But fantasy requires hope.

  No matter what, Mama was mine first.

  Here are the days that I wish would evaporate, slide right off the calendar and let me be. The first day of school, of spring, of the year. Parent-teacher night. Mother’s Day. My birthday. Their anniversary. The day she got sick. The day she died. That day of every month. Any holiday. Lots of days in between.

  My upcoming graduation from high school.

&nb
sp; Ivy Shaptaw says the pain will lessen in time.

  Wait and see …

  I keep a list of questions. Things that other girls seem to know without ever having to learn. What to write on that other line on a check. How to decline without disappointing. When to wear a slip. How to fix stockings with nail polish. How to stop static cling. When to end something.

  Outside, near the bird feeder, a leaf unfurls shiny and green. It is wet with newness. An idea. I imagine peeling back my skin, lifting my gauzy veil and stepping into the light. Then, the smell of something daily brings me to my knees. Macaroni and cheese or hot chocolate with marshmallows and just like that I am gone.

  That I have lost my mother is everywhere in my life. I am not confident in my skin. I am the last to leave a room. Every end feels like a loss. The dregs of her lotion, the last spray of her perfume. My closet bulges with clothes that do not fit me. I am trying to keep still, but the world does not stop. Not for one second. Even my body lurches forward without my permission.

  Nothing prepared me for this. No book. No talk. We were three always. Even when we were four. Now the two of us knock around in her space without a center. Still, we are held together by gravity. Opposites attracting, then reacting. In this way, we pass our losses back and forth between us, like bread. We feed each other with what we have of her—a glance, a borrowed phrase or warning. There is no way to know for sure what Mama might have said or done. We have learned to share this uncertain space.

  There are times when Elizabeth and I fight senselessly, without reason or result—a blind rage that stems from loneliness. In these fights, there is no room for compromise. We fight to feel something instead of loss. The way only sisters can fight—with the luxury of forever and forgiveness at hand. It is in conflict that we come closest to the selves we once were. Our grief filling the space between us like language. The memory of Mama shaping every word.