Bright Angel Time

by Martha McPhee

  Mom rushed from the house onto the little front porch. She stood there for the instant it took Julia to run screaming to her. Jane and I followed, stopping a short distance from the steps.

  Mom’s taffeta dress was wrinkled at the waist and her lipstick was gone. Her arms opened, and Julia collapsed into them. Mom rocked her, her hand caressing the back of Julia’s head. She looked past Julia’s curls to Jane, asking her with a look – what happened? They had a mysterious way of communicating that was all their own, but I could tell that Jane was in trouble. Her face became long, her eyes grew big and dense, taking over her face until it seemed she was just two enormous brown eyes. The rain plastered her hair to her skull. Even her braids hung limp, like two fraying ropes. The flowers drooped in her arms.

  “Eve? Eve, is everything all right?” The faces of three women appeared at the upstairs window. Their hair was messy like Mom’s, their ribbons and bandeaux were gone. Their smiles were panicky. I stared at them, hoping I’d recognize somebody’s mother so that I could make her feel uncomfortable, but I couldn’t.

  “Don’t worry,” Mom called to them. “It’ll be all right. Jane just wasn’t watching the girls.”

  Instantly I wished I hadn’t sided with Jane. I was afraid I’d get Mom’s silent treatment now too, and Julia would be favored for days.

  The screen door creaked open slowly and a man appeared. Anton: he was as big as Julia had described. Big round head. Big tall body. Big fingers. I thought about poker and the thirty thousand dollars a year. Then I thought about God – I don’t know why. Maybe because Julia had mentioned that Anton was a priest. I didn’t know much about God, but watching Anton appear I just thought about Him and then the thought vanished and I felt spooked and I smelled the stink of rotting toadstools that came from a grove of sycamores not far from the forsythia.

  Anton squinted, a deep furrow ran across his brow, as he squatted next to Julia and Mom. I could hear his joints crack. His hair was thin and graying. Thick sideburns striped his cheeks, and his shirt was an explosion of oranges, yellows, purples and greens. The sleeves were pushed up right below his elbows, and he wore a pair of faded jeans that hung low on his hips.

  “What’s wrong, babe?” he asked.

  What’s wrong, babe. Babe. His words rushed through me. Babe. The tenderness. His southern accent sounded somehow tough and strong yet protective, like his presence. He was bent down close to Julia, running his fingers through her hair. Her face was a mess of tears and drool. Mom stood watching, pressing her thumbnail into her lip.

  When Anton’s mouth touched Julia’s ear, her crying stopped. His lips on her ear, whispering into it. I felt as if those lips were touching my ear, wet and warm and soft, and I shivered, feeling that pleasure a whisper sends through your entire body, all the way to your toes. Julia sank against him and he pulled her deeper into him. She looked so tiny against him. They whispered back and forth and I wished that I were her.

  “Everything’s all right,” Anton said, rising. He loomed above us. His hand fanned out on top of Mom’s head. On his finger there was an enormous turquoise ring. I thought of Julia’s hand reaching inside that car. I thought of my hand with the man’s whiskers pressing into it. I wanted to know what the gentleman had done. I almost hoped he’d done something gross, because I knew if he had I’d hear about it in detail, and if Julia had learned something from it I knew she’d try to teach me. Anton noticed Jane and me watching, and he winked. “It’ll be all right,” he said, a little louder; he was talking to us.

  ♦

  We fell quickly to Anton, more quickly than Mom. We were limber, falling freely, and our world opened up, suddenly becoming brighter. Mom wanted it that way; she said Anton would love us, she promised to God it would be the truth. And we fell and fell and fell, we fell for the pure sensation of it. At first we were young enough not to hesitate or question, not to look behind.

  ∨ Bright Angel Time ∧

  Waiting

  Our father had left us the summer before, on the day the men landed on the moon. He had made a promise with us that morning: he would bring the TV out to the yard on the end of a long extension cord so that we could stare up at the moon while watching the men walk on it. He was going to tell us about the geology of the moon, but instead he ran away with the wife of his childhood friend to make a new life of his own.

  Hot and overcast. The air was opaque and thick, but soft. A visible heat swelled like waves around us, shimmying up our legs. All the trees were still, the way they are before a storm. Our big white house and the bright green lawns, a small pocket in the woods. The excited voice of a newscaster crackled through static on the radio and Jane kept fidgeting with the dial. She had set the radio up in the kitchen window so that we could hear outside. July 20, 1969. Three-thirty, four.

  Jane, Julia and I were dizzy with excitement, running through the sprinkler on our front lawn. The water fell in crystals and we leaped through them, catching them on our hot skin. Mine tingled and I was happy.

  “By the time we’re thirty,” Julia said, raising her left eyebrow (she could do that; she said she had double-jointed muscles in her eyebrows), “we’ll be going to the moon for vacation in spaceships.” She clapped her hands and kissed me and I kissed her back and then we twirled around in circles holding hands. Thirty seemed so far away. But Dad had said that time changed as you grew up, it passed more quickly. Years became months, months became weeks, days turned into minutes. Now I was impatient. Julia said that people were already making reservations to go to the moon and the spaceships were all booked up for years.

  Mom watched us from her garden. She was pulling up weeds just the same as every Sunday, nearly hidden among the columbine and purple delphinium. A card table holding a watermelon stood on the lawn nearby. We were waiting for Dad to come back from a tennis match before eating supper. Mom and Dad had made a special supper for a picnic on the lawn – southern fried chicken with thick, crusty skin, and chocolate-wafer icebox cake. I hoped it wouldn’t rain.

  “It’s getting late, Mom,” Jane said. “Where’s Dad? The Eagle’s gonna land soon.”

  “Don’t whine, Jane. He’s coming, dear. Just be patient,” Mom said. “He’ll be here any minute.” Mom wiped her brow. Her hair was pulled back with a red bandeau and she was sweating. She looked down the driveway, squinting, straining to hear. It was a long driveway of red gravel that sliced through the trees to the road. Then we heard a car.

  “Jane,” she said, “can’t you fix that radio? I can’t hear a thing he’s saying.” She started digging again. A heap of weeds were piling up by the edge of the garden. Daylilies surrounded the house and the shutters were freshly painted.

  A pale blue Ford sedan roared up the driveway, screeching to a halt. It was a familiar car, but it wasn’t Dad’s. Maybe Dad had borrowed a car. We always borrowed cars when ours broke down. But Brian Cain stumbled out of the driver’s seat, flailing a letter. Brian Cain was my father’s friend. He and his wife, Camille, came to cocktail parties at our house and always left before our bedtime because he got so drunk. I wondered why he was here now. His hair was white and thick and he was a big man with a potbelly that spilled over his plaid Bermuda shorts. All his flesh was loose, as if it might fall off like meat off a boiled chicken. He stood at his car door, trying to steady himself. His eyelids were red and swollen and his cheeks puffy. But the hand with the letter kept swatting the air. He slammed his car door and my stomach jumped.

  “They’ve run away,” he screamed. “Eve! Ya hear me, Eve? They’ve run away.” His voice echoed through the trees, against the house, louder than everything, even the radio static. “I’m gonna kill tha bastard.” He stumbled toward my mother. Her face wavered. We were frozen, watching, as Mom rose from the dirt, and walked in slow motion toward him.

  “Brian,” she said. “Brian.” Her legs were long and blotched with dirt. She wore her bathing suit, the one with the short skirt patterned with enormous daisies. Little palm prints of dirt stuc
k to her cheeks. Dirt was in her fingernails, between her toes. “Calm down. What’s happened?” The humidity had curled her hair.

  Brian was crying. Jane and Julia and I stood there solemnly. The sprinkler fanned back and forth, spraying us and the water seemed suddenly cold and unpleasant, prickers piercing my skin. I wished that Dad would come.

  “I gotta shotgun and I’m gonna kill the fuckin’ bastard,” he screamed. Then he poked at the letter with his index finger, stabbing it. “I’m gonna find ‘em and kill ‘em both.” He turned over the card table and the watermelon smashed into the grass. Raw pink swarming with black seeds like flies. Water seeped into my ears, clogging them, muffling sounds, everything seemed blurred.

  “Go inside, girls!” Mom said quickly. “Brian, let’s talk about this. Brian.” She was talking faster now. “Jane, don’t just stand there, take them inside.”

  Jane led us to the laundry room and locked the door. That’s where we hid sometimes when we were playing games. That’s where Mom and Dad sent us when we misbehaved at the dinner table. I felt giddy with that feeling of excitement, of getting away with something bad, squirming to get hidden.

  “What about Mom?” Julia said. “Do you think it’s true? We shouldn’t leave her there.”

  “Yeah, what about Mom?” I said, looking at Jane. I realized I was shivering.

  “Shush. Mom’s okay,” Jane said. Her eyes looked wide and remote as she wrapped a towel around me. The laundry room smelled of everything clean: of lemons and ammonia and bleach and detergent. Our clothes were neatly stacked in three piles. Summer jumpers and underpants with pink balloons. But folded you couldn’t distinguish whose pile was whose. I started to laugh. White blouses, just pressed, danced on their hangers in a breeze sneaking through the window.

  Julia pulled me close to her. She was crying, and her skin was spongy and wet and I laughed some more. Then Jane began to cry too, wrapping her arms around Julia and me. But I couldn’t stop laughing. My bathing suit was too small, and the straps were slicing into my shoulders. I buckled at the waist, wheezing uncontrollably.

  We handed clothes down among us and I found this suddenly funny. Julia’s bathing suit would become mine and Jane’s would become Julia’s. I wondered if Jane would get Mom’s suit with the daisies. I wanted that suit. I loved that suit.

  “Stop laughing, Kate,” Jane yelled into my ear.

  “Where’s Dad?” I demanded. “When is he coming home? He promised about the moon.” But they didn’t answer me, they just cried.

  ♦

  Dad had fallen in love with Brian Cain’s wife and they had run away together. They went on the summer vacation that we’d planned to take as a family – first to Maine and then to Nova Scotia, it was to have been a working vacation. Dad had given me a rock chisel and a prospector’s pick for that trip because he was going to teach me to help him. At the moment, though, we had no idea where he was. We thought he just needed time away from us. I remember now, how he would buy time from us. When we cried he gave us crisp dollar bills and begged us to stop. Time and peace were worth money to him. He knew about time: its brevity within the larger scheme of things. Dad wanted peace. Mom couldn’t give it to him.

  We didn’t understand then that Dad’s departure was larger than time, that it had to do with the love that Camille Cain had for him and that Mom did not.

  Later, that vacation would be included in Mom’s long list of things that Dad had stolen from us.

  ♦

  Dad could lift me up easily and set me on his shoulders. On his shoulders I became so tall and dizzy, I could see and touch the tops of things. I was above everything; only the trees were taller. I was above my mother and sisters, swirling around in the field behind our house. The air felt different up there, colder, fresher. I would say, “Run, Daddy, run” and clasp my hands around his warm neck. His hands were tight around my ankles. “Run, Daddy, run.” And Dad ran and ran and ran while I felt the wind against my face and I kept my eyes open wide.

  For a long time after my father left, I was afraid of getting big. I was afraid that when Dad came back I’d be too big for his shoulders. Jane and Julia already were.

  ♦

  At first, we expected Dad would come back any day. The four of us lay on Mom’s bed and waited. The ceiling fan stirred overhead, slowly and rhythmically, cooling us. Mom kept all the windows closed.

  While we waited, we watched television. Before Dad left we hadn’t been allowed to, but now things were different. We watched the Million Dollar Movie and the Late Movie, and then the Late Late Show. We didn’t talk much. We didn’t want to disturb Mom. She was so tired. We just lay there, all of us, waiting to fall asleep. Some nights we watched until the station went dead and the bedroom became blue with electric TV light. Glasses half-filled with water and bottles of aspirin shimmered on Mom’s bedside table next to a picture of her father. The channel purred a magnetic hum. I tried hard to fall asleep before the others. I was afraid of being left awake alone.

  In the mornings we slept late and ate breakfast in bed. Jane put Mom’s eyelet apron on over her pajamas and cooked enormous amounts of creamed chipped beef and made large pitchers of orange juice. Julia and I arranged a silver tray with doilies and flowers in a vase. We hung half-moons of oranges from the rims of the glass and rolled the silverware up in napkins. We sprinkled lots of parsley on the creamed chipped beef. When the tray was ready, Julia and Jane carried it together to Mom’s bed. Every morning was the same. We wanted to keep it just that way.

  ♦

  After several days, we started trying things.

  “Let’s write him letters,” Mom said. She sat up abruptly and looked at us across the bed. It was early afternoon. I was lying on my stomach picking at the cold food on the breakfast tray while Julia examined my scalp. She was looking for things, she said. She was always examining me with Q-tips: my belly button, my ears. I don’t know what she was hoping to find on my scalp, but her fingers felt good in my hair.

  The curtains were drawn, but light leaked through the seams. Jane was at the foot of the bed making a food-shopping list.

  “If we tell him how much we miss him and how much we love him, he’ll come back.” Mom’s eyes were puffy and red, but she smiled a wide, hopeful smile. “I love my little girls,” she said. “He loves his little girls.” My heart started to race. I thought maybe Dad didn’t know how much we missed him.

  So we wrote, furiously, on pads of white paper. Crayons and Magic Markers spilled out of their boxes, getting lost in the folds of snarled sheets. We worked with determination, pleased. You could hear pens scribbling over the page. Godzilla roared across the television screen in a landscape filled with giant rocks. I wrote ‘I love you’, just ‘I love you’, at least one hundred times all over my blank white page.

  “This is stupid,” Jane said. “You promised that we’d go food shopping.” She stood up and tossed her pad on the bed. Light from the television made her nightgown transparent, and I could see her thin legs and large underwear. Her eyes were big and dark. Mom said Jane had Dad’s eyes.

  “Write, Jane,” Mom said. “We need you to.” Mom rested her back against the headboard. It was upholstered in lavender fabric printed with large tulips, just the same as the spread, and it seemed to swallow her up.

  “He’s not coming back,” Jane said. Everything clenched inside me. I could feel the crumbs in the bed. I stopped writing. It was so easy for Jane to ruin things. She sat down and started scraping all the leftover creamed chipped beef onto one plate. It had turned thick and wobbly like Jell-O. The little flakes of beef had curled, dried up again. But still I wanted her to leave it alone. I was hungry. I was always hungry.

  ♦

  We never did send the letters. They stayed in the bed with us, accumulating along with books and television guides, newspapers and rubber bands.

  Sometimes we had fun in Mom’s bed. We fell in love with movie stars. Mom with Laurence Olivier. Jane with Omar Sharif. Julia and I fou
ght over Clark Gable. A week of Cagney turned into a week of Cooper. And then came three movies with James Dean. The men had long since returned from the moon.

  In mid-August we finally heard from Dad. He sent us a package. It sat on the kitchen counter while Jane decided what we should do. Sunlight caught its glossy paper and it shone. The box became a golden box and the bold black letters of Dad’s print shouted out our names.

  Jane was at the stove in Mom’s apron, stirring creamed chipped beef. Julia stood at the sink, which was piled with pots and pans and glasses and plates, trying to retrieve and wash plates for our breakfast.

  “Let’s just open it,” I said. I couldn’t understand why Jane wouldn’t. My chest pulsed and I could feel my thumbs throb. It seemed the box was throbbing too.

  “We shouldn’t open the box,” Jane said. Her hair was long and out of braids, her face red from the heat of the stove. The spoon in her hand was covered with a thick film of cream. “Or maybe we should open it and smash whatever’s inside and send it back to him.”

  “That’s absurd,” Julia said, moving toward the box. She liked big words. She was a show-off. Of the four of us she was the only one with brushed hair and the only one out of her nightgown. She was wearing her pink leotard and toe shoes. I agreed with Julia, though at first I didn’t believe that Jane could be serious.

  Jane ripped open the package and inside were three presents wrapped in cheerfully colored paper. Jane reached for one of the presents and Julia grabbed her arm and they started to fight. Their faces went red and splotched. They pulled at each other’s hair. But all I could think about was the present. It seemed to grow. My impulse was to grab, so I grabbed the present marked for me and ran.

  “Traitor,” Jane screamed. “He doesn’t love us anymore, Kate. You either!”

  I ran through the hall, up the stairs to my room, and flopped down on the bed. Inside the box was a Madame Alexander doll, Scarlett O’Hara with her green eyes. Gone With the Wind was my favorite movie; I’d seen it fifteen times. I didn’t even know Dad knew that. Scarlett’s hands held a rock for my collection of rocks and minerals. An ugly gray rock with thin lines of quartz running through it. Within the quartz were the tiniest flakes of gold. It was a nugget of the rock that gold comes from, and Dad’s note said that it was from South Africa, from 6,800 feet down in the ground and he’d been there to get it himself.