by Richard Ford
My mother was sitting at the kitchen table when I got dressed and came out into the house. She was eating a piece of toast and a scrambled egg on a plate and drinking coffee. She looked worn out, though she was dressed in a nice way–a white blouse with a white bow up to her neck and a brown skirt and high heels. She looked at me, then looked at the clock on the stove which said it was ten fifteen, then went on eating her breakfast.
‘Drink some coffee, Joe,’ she said. ‘Get a cup. You’ll feel like a white person in a minute.’
I took a cup down and poured coffee out of the pot. My cheekbone hurt where she had hit me, but there wasn’t a bruise I could see. I sat down across from her. I didn’t think she would talk about last night, and I was not going to bring it up. It was all clear enough to me.
‘What’re you about to do now?’ she said. She seemed very calm, as if something had stopped bothering her that had bothered her very much.
‘I’m not going to school today,’ I said.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect you’d go. I understand.’
‘What are you going to do?’ I drank some black coffee. I had not drunk much coffee before that, and it seemed too hot and not to have any taste to it.
‘I’m going over to those Helen Apartments and rent a place,’ she said. ‘It’ll have two bedrooms. You’re welcome to live there.’
‘All right,’ I said. I didn’t think she wanted me to, though it was not because she didn’t love me. It just wasn’t the first thing in her thinking that morning.
I sat at the table and tried to imagine what I could say to her, something that we could talk about together, anything ordinary about the future or even that day, but there didn’t seem to be anything. She looked out the window toward the backyard, where the sky was visible–blue and with no clouds in it–then she drank some more coffee, picked up her fork and put it on her plate.
‘Can I tell you something?’ she said, and sat up straighter.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You’re going to have all these other mornings in your life when you wake up and nobody’ll tell you how to feel,’ she said very slowly. ‘You’ll just have to know. So would you let me tell you how to feel this time? I won’t tell you any more. I promise.’
‘Okay,’ I said. And I was willing to do that. It was the thing I didn’t know how to do at that moment, and I was glad she thought she did know.
My mother put the tips of her fingers on the edge of her plate where there were only some crumbs left and her dull silver fork. She looked at me and narrowed her lips. ‘I haven’t lost my mind yet,’ she said. She looked away from me then as if she was hearing those words and thinking about the ones she was going to say next. ‘You don’t want to think when people do things you don’t like that they’re crazy. Because mostly they aren’t. It’s just that you’re not part of it. That’s all. And maybe you want to be.’ She smiled at me and nodded as if she wanted me to agree with her.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I understand that,’ and I did.
‘I know you don’t want to have this conversation with me,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t blame you. But I’m still alive. I haven’t died. You have to get used to that. You have to account for everything. We all do.’
‘Are you going to see Warren Miller today,’ I asked.
And this was a question I wish I hadn’t asked, because I didn’t really care what the answer would be, and she had something she thought was better on her mind because she said, ‘Christ almighty.’ She got up and took her plate to the sink and ran water on it. ‘The sky’s falling,’ she said. She leaned to the side and looked out the window at the morning sky. ‘That’s what you think, isn’t it?’ Her back was to me.
‘No,’ I said.
‘I couldn’t stand it to be young again,’ she said. ‘I’d run from the fountain of youth, I swear to God. Yes, I’m going to see Warren. Or I guess I will. I don’t know. Is that okay? I guess it’s not.’
‘Do you love him?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ my mother said. ‘And if you wonder how all that happens so fast, it simply does. So. Maybe it’ll be over in a hurry.’
I wanted to ask if she loved my father and if it was possible to love two people at once. Though I knew what she thought the answer was; it was yes in both cases. And I thought she was probably right and wished there was something else she could say or I could to make just this moment better or more like a moment from the life I knew before.
‘It isn’t that you can’t say no to somebody else, or somebody’s just too good-looking,’ my mother said. She was still looking out the window. ‘You can’t say no to yourself. It’s a lack in you. Not somebody else. That’s very clear to me.’
She looked at me over her shoulder just to see what my face looked like, or if I was about to say something or wanted her to say something else. But I must’ve seemed not to be thinking about that because she smiled at me and looked back out the window, just as if we were both waiting for something to happen. And I suppose in retrospect we were. We were waiting for my father to be there, and the fire to be controlled and for all our lives to become whatever they’d be from then on–different and maybe better or maybe worse.
‘Be kind to me,’ my mother said. ‘Would you be kind to me? I know it’ll make everything better. You can think bad things, but don’t say them.’
‘Yes, I will,’ I said.
She turned as though she was going to go back to the bedroom. But she reached toward me as she did, and patted me on my shoulder. She said, ‘You’re a sweet boy. You’re like your father.’
She left me in the kitchen and went into her room to get herself ready to leave. I still wanted to ask her if she loved my father. I thought I would have an easier time being kind to her if I knew that. But sitting at the kitchen table there, alone, I didn’t feel like I could shout it out, and didn’t want to go into her room again. So I had to make myself satisfied with not knowing, since we never talked about that subject afterward.
After a few minutes, she came back through the kitchen on her way out. She had brushed her hair and put on lipstick and perfume. She was wearing a red winter coat and had found her purse and the car keys where I had hung them beside the door the night before. She came to where I was still sitting at the table, looking at the headlines on the front page of the Tribune without really reading them, and she put her arms around my neck and she hugged me hard and quickly. I could smell the perfume on her neck. Her face felt hard against my face, and she had been smoking a cigarette that morning. She said, ‘Your life doesn’t mean what you have, sweetheart, or what you get. It’s what you’re willing to give up. That’s an old saying, I know. But it’s still true. You need to have something to give up. Okay?’
‘What if you don’t want to give up anything?’ I said.
‘Oh, well. Good luck. You have to.’ She smiled and kissed me again. ‘That’s really not one of the choices. You have to give things up. That’s the rule. It’s the major rule for everything.’
She went out the back door and across the cold yard toward whatever else the day would be likely to bring her way.
When she had been gone for a while and I’d finished reading the newspaper, I went back and got in my bed and tried to read my book on throwing the javelin, looked at the drawings of muscular men in all stages of the throw, but I couldn’t make myself think about that. And then I thought I should go to sleep again because when I woke up I would have to think about what I was going to do. I believed I would probably leave town that day, and that my mother and I had said good-bye but hadn’t exactly known it. Though I did not want to hurry, inasmuch as I didn’t know where to go at all, or how I would get there, or if I would ever come back. And that seemed in itself like a loss–not the leaving, but having to decide where to go and how to get there and what it all would cost me. The details were the loss. And I thought I knew what my mother meant by what she’d said about giving things up, and that she was right. And what I t
hought about as I fell asleep in my bed late in that morning was loss and how I would get along with it alone and what I had of myself that I was willing to lose.
When I woke up again it was three o’clock. I had slept five hours and missed all of school for that day. I felt like I might not be going to school anymore and not to college either. I didn’t see how that could be, but I felt it was, and I would not be surprised if someone said as much to me soon. And I felt that maybe the best part of my life was over for me now, and other things were starting. I was almost seventeen.
I took a shower and put on clean clothes. It was cold in the house, and I went into the kitchen and turned the furnace up, and looked for some sign that my mother had been in the house again. Her plate was still in the sink and her coffee cup was on the countertop the way they had been. Out the back window in the yard, red-winged blackbirds were sitting all across the grass. My mother’s car was not in front of the house, though down Eighth, farther down than where it had been the night before and almost hidden behind our side hedge, Warren Miller’s pink Oldsmobile was sitting against the curb. No one was in it. Though even as I was looking, Warren Miller himself walked, limping, out from behind the hedge and up the sidewalk toward the front of our house, and through the gate and up our walk as if he was coming right in the house, just as if my mother was there waiting for him.
I stepped to the side of the door, and reached across and under and turned the lock closed. I could hear Warren Miller’s heavy steps on the porch as he came to the door. The ceiling light was on in the kitchen, and I knew he could see it and would think someone was inside. But I didn’t move, though my heart started to pound fast. I stayed with my face against the wall while Warren turned the bell on the door, turned it twice, and waited. I could see just part of him through the window glass, the front of his coat. I heard his feet move, heard the change jingle in his pockets. He took a coin out of his pocket and tapped it on the glass, and said, ‘Jenny, hon, are you inside? Are you inside there?’ He waited a few seconds, then turned the doorknob to walk in, but the lock stopped him. He pushed it twice and pulled it back–not hard, but firmly. I was no more than a foot from him, though the wall was between us. I heard him say, ‘Lord, Lord, Lord.’ Then he walked off the porch.
I looked around the window frame at him. He was walking around toward the side of our house. I turned and hurried back through the kitchen in my sock feet and locked the back door before he could get to it. Then I went back into the hall, exactly where I had seen him the night before when he hadn’t seen me. I listened to him tap on the door glass with his coin, then try the knob there, then go to the kitchen window and try it and find out it was locked. I heard him call my mother’s name again. Not in a frantic voice, but an insistent one, as though he knew I was inside hiding from him, in my own house, and wouldn’t let him in. I stayed in the hall listening while the furnace went on and off, heard him come to my mother’s window and try it, then heard him try my window. But both of them were locked. He tapped on my window. I knew he could see that my bed was not made, and that a towel from the bathroom was on the floor, and my shoes were there. I knew he knew I was there, and for that reason he might just break the glass and come in. But he didn’t. He tried my window again, tapped on it, then it was quiet from all I could hear in the shadowy hallway. I stood and listened, tried to hear his limping walk. But I couldn’t, though in a minute I thought I heard his car start down the street, heard the motor rev up high as if by accident. Then I heard nothing, no car sound, no sound at the door, no footsteps limping. And I thought he had finally gone away.
I walked down the hall and looked into my mother’s room, where I had not wanted to go. The bed was made up. There was a pillow on the floor and clothes pushed out of the closet, and the curtains were shut so that the room was shadowy and cool. The clock said that it was three forty-five in the afternoon. I walked into the room and turned on the ceiling light. And what I saw on the floor near the end of the bed was a pair of socks, gray and red nylon ones turned almost inside out and–it looked to me–thrown there maybe from the bed. I walked over and picked them up, then looked around the floor to see what else there might be. I looked under the pillow and under the bed, but didn’t see anything else–nothing that Warren Miller would want back or that my mother might want hidden. I took the socks into the kitchen and wrapped them in the newspaper that was on the table. Then I put the bundle in the trash under the sink and took the paper bag of trash out behind the house to the metal garbage can and put it in and went back in the house to put on my coat so I could go out into the town.
And then for a while I walked out into Great Falls.
It was late afternoon, and I knew it would not be light much longer, and that it would turn cold once the light had fallen, and I would not want to be out then but would want to be someplace else: on a bus going away from there, or in a hotel room in another town, or at home with my mother waiting for whatever would happen to us next. I did not know what that could possibly be.
Great Falls was a town where I did not know the streets well, so that I walked first to my school on Second Street, where there were still people inside and the lights were on even though school was out for the day. Boys were running on the track at the south end of the building, and the football team was scattered on the long playing field in their white practice jerseys, going through their drills in the chill breeze. I waited and watched them, listened to the sounds of clapping and shoulder pads hitting and their voices until I thought I might be noticed on the sidewalk at the edge of the grass. Someone would remember I’d played for a while and that I’d quit. And I didn’t want to think about what someone else thought. So I walked all the way down Second Avenue North to the park by the river, then down the stream past the tennis courts and the archery targets to the Fifteenth Street Bridge and out onto the pedestrians’ walk, where I took the clasp knife Warren Miller had given me–two days before, though it seemed like a month–and dropped it over the rail to where I couldn’t see it strike the flat water.
From the bridge I could see the silver oil refinery tanks and the light towers at the baseball field where the Great Falls team played. I could see the fairgrounds and the smelter stack and the hot-rod course in Black Eagle, and the three white elevators Warren Miller owned or at least had an interest in, and where my mother said she wanted to work or had already worked or soon would if any of that was a true story. And beyond were the open prairies, flat and treeless as far away as I could see, all the way to Minneapolis and St. Paul, my father had told me.
Below the bridge two men were fishing, two tall Negroes standing on the dry flats casting spinner spoons into the current. Two young white women sat on the grass on a blanket watching them, talking and laughing. The women had on slacks. No one was catching fish, and it did not seem to me like a good day to catch fish. The men were from the air base, I thought, and today was their time off. I doubted if they cared about the fish. They cared about the girls who, I thought, were town girls or Air Force girls, or nurses at the hospital, or waitresses who had their own days off together and were spending it this way, with these men. They seemed to be enjoying themselves.
I walked back up Fifteenth Street, under the trees that lined it, all the way to Tenth Avenue South and turned east and walked away from town. I thought that I would walk as far as the air base fence and watch the bombers take off toward the DEW Line or the Pacific–wherever they went. It was a thing I’d done with my father the spring before, after work, the big planes only lighted shadows that shot ahead of their big noises and disappeared into the stars and night.
Now seemed to be a time–the first one in my life–when I needed to know exactly what to do, and out of all the choices I had I wanted to choose the right thing, and start in that direction. So as I walked out the busy street past the air base strip joints and the car dealerships and the motels with their winter rates already on display, I began to arrange my thinking. My mother was going to marry Warre
n Miller soon; we would live in another house in Great Falls, and my father would probably move away to some other town, back to Lewiston, maybe. I understood why she liked Warren: because he knew things. He knew more things than my father did, and he was older. I wondered if there had been other men in my mother’s life before, or other women in my father’s, people I didn’t know about. But I decided that there hadn’t been because I would have known it–being there as I was all the time, with them. And then I wondered what would happen if my father had an accident where he was, or lost his memory, or never came back home. How would that be? Or if my mother didn’t come home today and I never saw her again. Would anyone understand anything then?
When I got to Thirty-eighth Street, I crossed over to the south side and walked along the bar fronts there. Cars were parking in front of the bars, and men and women were getting out to go in and drink. Behind the bars were sheds and then rows of small new houses built on new streets, and beyond that an empty drive-in movie and a railroad spur and then the town stopped and the fields of winter wheat began.
So, I wondered, were my mother and father separated now? Was that what this meant? My father leaves the house. My mother has another man come to visit her. I knew you could know the words but not match them with the life. But to be able to do it right said something about you. And I didn’t know if my judgment was good enough, or exactly what was good or bad. Though there must be times, I thought, when there was no right thing to know, just as there were times when there was no right thing to do. ‘Limbo’ was the word my mother had used, and that is where I was now–in limbo, between the cares of other people with only my own cares to show me what to do.
