The lesson was clear. If even our dinner table was public, only your own head was really private. I will never know how much she knew of what went on in mine. I can only guess what went on in hers.
One of the pictures my sister has sent me is of my mother with me, as a baby, in her lap. If I am that little, we must still be in France, and so the overstuffed chair we sit in, though it appears ordinary in every way, must be a French chair. Carol is there, too, of course. Leaning forward, one eye on the camera, about to plant a dramatic kiss on her baby sister’s cheek. My mother is smiling, the warm, slight smile that was her best reward, but at something outside the square boundaries of the photograph: a window or mirror or maybe something boiling on the stove.
I am too young to be talking in the picture, saying something my mother doesn’t want to hear. Still she looks somewhere else, smiling vaguely, as if she weren’t quite there, as if there were other places she would rather be. When I play with my own daughter, I sometimes find myself drifting, too, looking at the TV or a magazine out of the corner of one eye. I smile and say, Back in just a minute, have to check the stove. I use any old excuse to get up off the floor and go.
But where? Once in the kitchen, I find myself just standing, staring out the door. So I need to know what my mother was waiting and watching for. A different life and the moving van to take her there? I imagine she was waiting even as a child, looking out a window for a sign of rescue, some small bird, a hidden angel, to stop and pull the sadness from her like an earthworm pulled from good ground.
She was waiting from the moment she was born, in Morehead, Kentucky, now home to a fair-size college with a decent basketball team, but then just a small coal town in the Appalachian Mountains. Her father, J.L., was a contractor during the Depression, when no one was building much of anything. After the war, he bought a coal mine just in time to see the bottom drop out of that market as well. My mother was born on either April 25 or 26, 1917. The family disagreed about the actual date, so she liked to claim both days. Why not? She didn’t use the two days to double her celebration as much as to deny either of them the power of making her another year older.
I have no proof she was born with that slightly distant air she has in my baby picture. No pictures of my mother as a baby are in the shoe box my sister has sent. They were all lost along with my grandparents’ house in the Great Morehead Flood of 1939. On the Fourth of July, with no warning, water swept through the town, washing my grandparents’ house off its foundation, sweeping all their belongings away. My mother said she had to spend the night in a tree, clinging to her younger brother, who had a broken leg.
When the water went down, they found their grandmother dead in the house, stuck head down in the mud that had filled the kitchen. As a young girl, my mother had been sent for a while to live with her grandmother and take care of her. She was bitter about this, and she always seemed to say “stuck head down in the mud” with a certain grim satisfaction. After all, we are only born to suffer and die.
The earliest surviving picture of my mother is one taken when she was four or five. She is sitting on a lawn with her only sister, Ellie. Ellie was two years older. Carol is two years older than me. Ellie and my mother are wearing matching white dresses and holding brand-new dolls. The dolls have Kewpie doll faces and bee-stung lips like flappers, but their hair is in long braids and they each wear a headband with a single fluffy feather stuck in it. They are Indian maidens.
Ellie is looking right at the camera. Her dark hair gleams, her dark eyes as well. She smiles as if she had a secret she would just love to whisper in your ear. Ellie was the pretty one, my mother always said. My mother once overheard a great aunt say that it was shame Ellie didn’t have my mother’s good skin, that it was wasted on a plain girl like her. In this picture, my mother is squinting as if the sun were too bright, though my aunt’s eyes are wide open. For once, Mother is looking in the general direction of the camera. Here, it is her doll whose coy eyes gaze sideways at something or someone beyond the frame.
My mother’s family always called her by her full name, Mary Olive. Ellie was always Ellie Mae. They had the Southern habit of double names, but my mother never liked the Olive part. She was tall and thin and altogether too like Popeye’s Olive Oyl to avoid being teased. She graduated from high school in a class of eight and went on to get a B.A. in home economics at the teacher’s college in her hometown. She said it was the only science degree women were allowed to take.
In the shoe box I find a tiny, square black-and-white snapshot I have never seen before. My mother is in some sort of test kitchen with one other girl, who is dropping cookie dough onto a baking sheet and smiling at the camera. Mother stands at a big white stove wearing a stiff, striped apron and does not look at the camera or smile. She appears to be waiting for the largest tea kettle I have ever seen to boil. She has exactly that distant look I recognized in my baby picture. It is as if the kettle were more than a kettle, and she is waiting, watching, and listening for something more than the white hiss of steam.
Having a degree in the science of being a homemaker didn’t make my mother want to be one. She was an awful cook. She tended to read a recipe and remove what she felt were unnecessary ingredients, until stew became boil one pound meat in one gallon water until both are gray. When Lipton’s Onion Soup Mix came on the market, she started adding that to everything, stew, pot roast, meat loaf. It was a real improvement.
My mother acted as if taste in food was dangerous. If called upon to make something special, she fell back on eye appeal, following the lead of the color pictures in her Family Circle or Betty Crocker cookbooks. She would drape canned asparagus over lettuce wedges or arrange canned pears on lettuce leaves and decorate them with a dollop of mayonnaise and a sprinkle of cheddar cheese. In general, she cooked as if she resented it as much as she resented not having been allowed to study something more worthwhile. She would have liked to have been a doctor, she once told me. But it wasn’t possible.
She graduated from high school when she was seventeen. Then she taught school, up in the mountains where many of her students were older than she was. So far back in the hills the sun don’t shine, she used to say. Where her students’ mothers sewed them into their long underwear for the winter, and they didn’t bathe from fall until spring. It took her eight years to finish her B.A., teaching all the while. So she jumped at the chance to get away, and her chance was the Women’s Army Corps. In 1942 when she enlisted, the idea of women in the army was controversial, and the government was very cautious. Recruits had to be college graduates whose backgrounds had been thoroughly checked by the FBI.
My mother made it in and left Kentucky and her family behind. She also left half her name. In the WACs, there were so many Marys they used middle initials to keep them straight. My mother became Mary O., and she never used Olive again. When I was pregnant with my daughter, my husband and I had a hard time agreeing on possible baby names. I vetoed all his family names, he returned the favor. Finally he suggested Olivia, in honor of my mother. I told my sister. “Mom would spin in her grave,” she said. She was right. In the end, we picked a name no one we knew had ever had.
My mother said she discovered the world in the WACs. She was posted to Toledo, Ohio, where she had pizza for the first time and danced the polka at somebody’s wedding. Then she went to sea, sailing back and forth across the treacherous North Atlantic evacuating wounded soldiers. She rose to the rank of major, a very high rank for a woman in those days.
There are more pictures of my mother in the service than of anything else in the box. Marching in long lines of women. On a bus with nothing but men. There are several snapshots that seem to have been taken at parties or in officers’ clubs. Men in uniforms, women in suits with white corsages on their lapels. In these, she is smiling directly at the camera as if she were happy for the first and maybe only time in her life. In one, she hugs a pillar in the middle of a dance floor, her head thrown back. She is obviously laughing and m
aybe a bit drunk.
Then in 1953 she left the WACs and married my father, demoted from major to army wife. In those days, she told me, you couldn’t be married or have children and also be a WAC. She gave birth to my sister, followed my father when he was ordered to France, discovered she was pregnant again, and had me. I can tell all that from the outside, from the record, from the pictures. But what happened to her really? All I know is she changed names again. My father called her just Mary, or, more often, your mother. As in, I don’t know, ask your mother, or, Tell your mother where you’ll be.
The last photograph in the box is a color snapshot of my mother sitting at the kitchen table in our house in Cocoa. I took this one with my first camera, an Instamatic. I’d asked for one for Christmas so I could take pictures of my friends. By this time, for reasons I didn’t understand and no one seemed willing to explain to me, Mother was spending most of each day in bed. I wanted to try out my new camera, so I snuck up on her as she was having her morning cup of instant coffee. Just before I pushed the button, she saw me.
“Oh, no,” she said, and raised her hand to cover her face. So there she is, a woman with gray hair that needs a new permanent, frozen in her bathrobe in that unhappy moment as my mother. Not looking at the camera or away from it, not looking anywhere at all, as if she had nowhere she wanted to look, nothing she wanted to see anymore. Behind the blur of her hand hiding her face, I can see her eyes are closed, too, as if her life were a double-locked door.
4 June 1966
My father called to say he’d found a house. My mother, Carol, and I had flown back to D.C. so Carol and I could finish the last three weeks of school and my mother could sell our old house; he’d stayed behind and started work in Florida. We all took turns asking, but my father refused to describe the new house. We’d see it soon enough, he said. The family living in it would be moving as soon as school was out. My mother already had an offer for our house from a family who would be moving from California as soon as school ended there. I had a vision of families all over the country moving at the end of the school year, like one giant Chinese fire drill. I couldn’t wait.
I couldn’t make myself pay attention in school. We were studying Maryland history in fourth grade. What was the point? I was already a Floridian, and in Florida there would be different names and dates to learn. When I looked at my history lesson, the words swam in incomprehensible rows over the page, like I was still staring at the ocean’s waves.
Carol, though, got sentimental, pressing roses from the hundred bushes my parents had planted around the house in a fit of landscaping, never mind how many hours we’d spent picking Japanese beetles off those same rose bushes, dropping them into mason jars full of kerosene for the grand bounty of a nickel a jar. She shot a roll of pictures with her Brownie Starlite: the front yard, the backyard, her Flexible Flyer, which there was no point in taking to Florida where it never snowed. For her, the three weeks went by too fast, like when you stare out a car window and the telephone poles along the highway are one big blur. For me, the weeks dragged along like when you pick out one pole way up ahead, and follow it with your eyes as it comes closer, so slowly it hardly seems like you are moving at all.
We missed the Surveyor 1 launch, then four days later, Gemini 9. “We could have been right there,” I said to Carol, shaking my head as we watched it blast off on TV. When I asked my dad on the phone if he’d seen the launch, he said he had been at the office all day but that he had felt it. At the time, he’d thought it was a truck turning off the highway.
The last day of school finally came. The movers parked their Mayflower van on our lawn and loaded up all our furniture except for a double bed we were going to sleep on for four nights, then leave for Goodwill. My mother watched, impressed, as the men from Mayflower swaddled the dining-room table in padded quilts, wrapped the chairs in plastic. Army movers were not so careful: the last time, they had actually broken her couch in two. The next thing to get shipped was the dachshunds.
My mother gave Bertha and Gretel the tranquilizers the vet had prescribed, wrapping the pills carefully in balls of fresh hamburger, though she needn’t have bothered. Dachshunds will eat anything. Bertha had once gotten up on the picnic table at a cookout and before we caught her had eaten half a watermelon, a plate of raw onions, and four sticks of butter. After they ate their tranquilizer meatballs, they got very sleepy, staggering around on their short, stiff legs, then toppling over, whumpf like tiny beached whales.
Bertha had been our first dachshund and was still my favorite. She was a standard red, with a chest as massive and impressive as Queen Victoria’s. The man who owned her mother had promised us a female, and she’d been the only one in her litter. When we went to get her, he shook his head, already regretting his decision. “She could have been a champion,” he said. Bertha loved, in descending order, my father, who always walked her; my mother, who fed her; me, who let her sleep in my bed when it was thundering or there were fireworks. She had no room left in her heart for Carol. Maybe they were too alike. Bertha had a long dachshund nose and could freeze Gretel, the younger dog, with one well-timed look down it. When she did this, to me she looked just like Carol.
If Carol was Bertha, I guess Gretel was me. Gretel’s feet pointed out like mine. She was bowlegged, too, and had a goofy overbite. She loved anybody and everybody with a sort of warm, sloppy equality. She was Carol’s favorite. I preferred Bertha’s fierce and ordered loyalty. Even with dogs, I guess, opposites attract.
So now I knelt beside Bertha, my favorite, kissing the soft, smooth spot behind her ear, breathing her rich dog smell. She was whimpering a little. Suddenly, I didn’t want to let her go. I was afraid something might happen to her. “I won’t let anyone take you away from me,” I whispered in her ear, hugging her. Then I let Mom put her in the big shipping crate and take her out to National Airport, like this was just a practice for all of life’s small betrayals. Lucky, our cat, who my sister and I had named after the littlest Dalmatian in 101 Dalmatians, was going to be carried on the plane.
The next day, the people in my mother’s office at the Treasury Department gave her a farewell party, and she came home late from work with slices of the cake for Carol and me. Eddie, a woman from her car pool, followed her in, carrying a box of stuff from my mother’s desk. She looked like she had been crying. I knew her mostly as the one who always sent us Christmas cards signed by herself and her poodle, Sammy. She hugged my mother as she left. “Think about it, Mary,” she said. “It’s not too late to change your mind.”
My mother shook her head. “The girls,” she said. “Besides,” my mother waved a hand at our empty living room, “my furniture is already there.”
The last thing my mother did before we went to the airport was dope Lucky, stuffing the pill down his unwilling throat and bundling him into the cardboard carrier the airline had given her. I got to sit at the very front of the plane with the cat at my feet, while my mother and Carol sat a dozen rows behind me. A woman with a small terrier in an identical carrier sat next to me. She was flying to Atlanta for her mother’s funeral, she told me. I opened my mouth prepared to tell her some version of why we were moving to Florida, only to be struck by that complete sense of freedom that comes with traveling alone. I would never see this woman again. I told her I was an orphan, traveling to Florida with my cat to meet my adoptive parents. My new dad, I told her, was an astronaut.
Just then Lucky began to hiss and spit inside his cardboard cage, tearing at the cardboard with his claws. He seemed anything but tranquilized. He let loose a long yowl that left the terrier shaking. The woman scooted her dog as far toward the aisle as she could manage. She looked relieved when the plane landed in Atlanta.
After the terrier woman got off, Carol came up to sit by me. By the late afternoon, as we were circling Orlando, Lucky had pretty much shredded the cardboard cat carrier, and we were taking bets on what the stewardess would do if he got loose. Just as we landed, the cat dope he had been resi
sting so valiantly for the whole flight took hold, and he fell fast asleep.
My father met us at the airport. He was wearing sunglasses, pleated khaki pants, and a short-sleeved white shirt. It was the first time I’d ever seen him without a T-shirt underneath. He loaded us into the car, and we headed for the new house, which he still refused to describe. “Just you wait,” he said as he drove. “You can hold out one more hour.”
Outside Orlando, the land on either side of the highway turned incredibly flat. It stretched away into the hazy distance broken only by pine trees with low, umbrella-like branches. It reminded me of something, and when I realized what, I poked Carol. “Hey, look,” I said, “the Dark Continent.” She sat up and opened her eyes. It did look like Africa, like any minute we would see lions in the dry grass. My father took his eyes from the road for a second. He shook his head. He didn’t see the similarity, but then he watched a lot less of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom than Carol and I did.
“Now, girls,” my mother said.
Then up ahead in the veldt, something truly strange appeared. “Look,” I said, pointing. My father slowed down. A road met the highway, and off it branched more paved roads, miles of roads lined by overgrown sidewalks. There were even poles for street lights, an intersection with a faded stop sign. But no houses. A complete town laid out in the middle of nowhere with no houses. It was so odd, my father braked again, slowing the car to a crawl. In front of us, mounted on top of a metal pole, was a rusty planet with two lesser balls of corrosion orbiting it. The sign said SATELLITE CITY.
“Oh, I read about this,” my father said. “Seems that Kennedy planned to put the Manned Space Center out here somewhere, but Johnson put it in Houston instead, and the bottom fell out.”
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