“I did a paper on tropical forests,” Ruth told me, “for school. Did you know that the problem is that tropical forests have infertile soil? The nutrients are all in the vegetation. That’s why they can’t clear the forests without letting all the species die. I got a quote from both candidates for my paper. He said, ‘What’s that, little lady?’ and she said, ‘Tropical deforestation is an unparalleled tragedy.’ I mean, I didn’t talk to them directly, just their offices, but still—”
“I’d like to see your paper,” I said.
“Sure. I’m going to print it out when I get it back. I didn’t want to do that, you know, until I saw the teacher’s comments.”
Print it out. Right. The home computer center. I’d forgotten.
“Momma, what’re you going to do?” Martha sat on the bare living room floor, uneasy. She didn’t like my being here. Being up there where nice old Drew had a pasture full of bovines was one thing, something she could explain to herself: I was an outdoor type, a nature lover the same as she was. But sitting here in this more or less empty house, with no man in sight (although she’d never have said that out loud), made her nervous. Younger kids than she and Ruth would have climbed up and down the secret ladder ten times by now; younger kids would have thought that tearing off the outside of the witch’s gingerbread house was a lark. But I reminded myself that teen was a word that originally meant hurt or injury. So why was I surprised that these girls of mine, turning thirteen and fourteen, were teening?
“Do?” I answered my youngest. “I’m going to be tutoring kids for the SAT—if I can figure out how to get the answers myself.” I told them all the analogy I’d talked about at Theo’s. They all got it; it wasn’t a big deal. Explain it to me, I said. Oh, vague hand gestures, you know, peripheral, out there; loquacious, out there. Cardinal, that’s just one or two main points, right? Laconic, you just make the main points, right? Clearly, I concluded, a little learning is a handy thing.
“I mean, Momma, I thought you and Drew, I thought you were going to live up at the farm. You said—”
“I did. But divorces take time. His especially.”
“Oh.” Martha fiddled with the stack of BAN THE BOX posters, as if she didn’t know what to say when presented with this grown-up reality. A problem I shared.
“Can we sign up, Mrs. Tait?” Sugar Bledsoe was stretched out on her back on the floor, flexing her calf muscles.
“I’m counting on it.”
“That score follows you all your life; it’s your social security number. You do bad on it, you’re brain dead as far as schools are concerned.”
Baby, who was sitting cross-legged, flattening her knees to the floor to stretch her inner thighs, said, “You brain any deader we gonna put a lily in your hand, close your eyes.”
“I’m going to close your eyes, you tree stump, if you don’t cut out that kind of talk.” To me, Sugar said, “Pardon, Mrs. Tait, I’m using peer parlance here.”
“The SATs,” Baby went on, “they full of words like iconoclast and sequester. How’m I doing, Mrs. Tait?”
Sure enough, I looked them up in my Hot Words and read aloud. “ ‘Iconoclast: a person who attacks cherished beliefs or established institutions.’ ‘Sequester: to keep away from others, to segregate.’ ” I looked at Baby. “How’d you know that?”
“That’s policemen’s talk: ‘We gonna sequester the iconoclasts.’ ”
Sugar rose up to her almost six-foot height and walked over and put her foot on Baby’s head. “You are a losing proposition.”
Baby, laughing, said to me, “She mean I am intractable.”
“You are recalcitrant.” Sugar did squat thrusts in Baby’s face.
I tossed the book in the air. “You two’ve got it memorized.”
“We going to turn down Brown and go to Yale.”
Ruth, who had wandered off upstairs, came back, tugging at her puffs of hair, making elephant ears. “Lots of space,” she said. “You planning on us staying here?”
“I’d like that.”
“You getting any furniture?”
“Theo has some 1920s horsehair stuff in storage, she says. Things she packed away the minute Shorty proposed.”
“That’s my granddaddy,” Ruth explained to the Bledsoes. “The only one I’ve got. One grandparent. That’s like back on the frontier or something. Everybody I know has about ten or twelve.”
“You’ve got Theo.”
“Does she count?” Ruth asked.
“She’s to me what Jae-Moon will be to you.”
“What do I call her? She teaches at high, right? When I see her in the halls or something.”
“She’s teaching in the Academy program.”
“Really?” Ruth didn’t know whether this was bad news or good. I couldn’t help her there.
“She’d like ‘Grandmom,’ I suspect. Not in the classroom.”
“Really? I thought she was kinda—not too involved with you, you know?”
“No, that was me.” I gave her a big smile, which went sailing over her head, but was a joke between me and me, and this was my house.
“What I mean, is—” Ruth wandered out into the hall, came back in, clearly working up to something. “We’re supposed to start staying here on the weekends.”
I hadn’t got that in my head. Had thought that applied to down the road sometime, when I’d got the rest of my life straightened out. I’d thought I’d be so glad to see them when they walked this way after school, instead of walking the other way to their dad’s house. And I’d thought how much I was going to miss hearing them argue every day about their genetic cow projects and their trees-per-acre saved by vegetarians. But I hadn’t got around to realizing that even as we spoke now Eben and Dr. Song were counting on having the parsonage without its daughters on the weekend. “So,” I said, “I’ll need something for you to sleep on.”
“Momma, we need soap and towels and sheets and food.” It was just this side of a wail. “There’s nothing up there; there’s nothing down here. Bulletin to the short people.”
I wondered if I should offer to put them up over at Theo’s? My newly reconstituted mom might love nothing better than tucking them in the Guest room, ha, ha, and packing coconut custard pie into their long lean frames. “Two weeks,” I promised, “I’ll have all the comforts of home.” I tried to keep my tone light. Not to shout about how I was doing the best I could as fast as I could and how did they think I was suddenly going to materialize a life-style as secure as the one they had, not to mention the high-tech, high-priced spread they were about to be acquiring.
Martha dimpled in my direction, sensing with her younger sibling’s radar that Ruth and I were chewing at the very edges of hurt feelings. “Daddy and Jae-Moon are taking us out to eat for our birthday. We’re going next Saturday, because Daddy can’t do it Sunday. So maybe we can come see you and help out with the house the next weekend. How about that, Momma? Then you could look at—Granddaddy’s wife’s things, and everything. Okay?”
Right, their birthdays. “I got you something,” I remembered. Getting up and carrying out the pitcher of lemonade I’d made for them (custody of the pitcher being one of my big coups). From my bedroom upstairs, which had at this moment a sleeping bag on the floor (and, in the attic, my old formals from the younger Mrs. Dr. Croft), I brought down the two washable fabric “paper bags” I’d got the girls on Lago Lake Drive.
“Sorry,” I said to Baby and Sugar, “none for you.”
“Disparate,” Baby said. “Malicious.”
“Dickhead.” Sugar punched her so that she rolled over on her back, then went into a somersault.
“Thanks, Momma.” Martha looked touched that I’d got something for them, anything at all, most likely.
“This is neat,” Ruth said, folding it over and Velcroing it shut, holding it up to show that it was a reusable clone of a real lunch sack.
Martha came over and gave me a squeeze, and her cheeks were damp. “I’m doing a paper,” she sa
id, “on the animal genome project at Texas A & M, the one using Brangus cattle. My teacher said that was of general interest because in current events they talked about that France has banned beef from Britain because of mad-cow disease. And she let me do it because I was the only one in class who knew what that was, bovine spongiform encephalopathy.”
“That’s great.” I squeezed her back. “I bet you can feed your new machine a lot of material and get a whole lot of data back.” Was my voice just barely tinged with that nebulous negative, jealousy? I tried my best.
“My teacher said I could submit it for the public awareness essay contest, if it turned out to be good enough.” Martha nicely sidestepped my comment.
Past her shoulder, I saw Ruth frown and bite her lower lip; my tone was never lost on her.
Barbara Bledsoe, who had written down my directions from the Fairgrounds—Hackberry to Blackberry, Mulberry to Huckleberry—honked out front, right on the minute.
The four girls picked up their stacks of BAN THE BOX and WRAPPING IS A RIPOFF. Lined up going out the door, in their THINK GLOBALLY / ACT LOCALLY T-shirts, all in a sort of faded wishy-washy, one-world green, with the ten worst threats to the planet listed in order, plus pictures of dolphins, forests, lakes, tires, garbage sacks, all moving with the curves of their breasts and the thrusts of their shoulder blades, they look like some brave new peace corps, larger-than-life size. Awesome.
“Good luck in the race,” I said to them.
Then, as I waved, and they clambered into the idling new Olds, I heard Sugar say, “You can stay with us until your mom gets her place fixed up.”
HAVING TAKEN A week off in celebration of Earth Day, the weather let loose its entire repertoire of tricks. The Hubble telescope, according to the paper, opened its eye to golf-ball-size hail; baseball-size hail was reported east of West. Funnel clouds and tornadoes descended across the county, the National Weather Service Station in Waco reporting sightings on the North Bosque at 3:55 p.m., the South Bosque at 4:25, China Spring at 4:27, east of the traffic circle at 4:52. Sirens met themselves going and coming, sounding like a barbershop quartet over-harmonizing. Temperatures dropped overnight from the high eighties to the high forties. After the hail had landed like meteorites on the dusty ground, twisters had picked up the whole and made flying mud pies of it, and then north central Texas was hit by the worst flash floods since the twenties. The paper carried daily photos of the swollen Trinity, the Brazos’s sister river to the east. It carried stories of Dallas County sustaining millions of dollars in property damage. But mostly it carried pictures of Dallasites in rowboats, Dallasites stranded on rooftops, Dallasites gazing from treetops down at drowned Cadillacs.
Deaths of humans and animals made the news. An unidentified woman drowned south of West when a flash flood washed out the two-lane farm-to-market. A couple was killed in a pickup when a bridge gave way and they were washed downstream. Teens capsized on an outing to Save the Marshlands. A seventy-year-old man was swept away on the bank of the Trinity, fishing line in hand. Five hundred dairy cows drowned as thousands of acres of farmland were inundated.
Rescue workers—Red Cross and fire departments—met further obstacles. Water pressure punctured an oil line and the surface of the river became an oil slick. The high water brought out poisonous snakes by the thousands, seeking higher ground. Fire ants swam on the surface of the bloated water, decimating everything in their path. Power lines were down; lightning ignited a 220,000-barrel tank of gasoline.
Then it hit the Brazos, and prurient readers stopped telling Dallas jokes. Thirty horses went under not far from Horseshoe Bend. All fishing docks closed. Flood control measures went into effect. And, extremely locally, meaning at my house, awful-alpine trim stayed in place, and it was too wet to move furniture or even to look at Theo’s castoffs in storage.
The flash floods, especially the story about the unidentified woman on a two-lane south of West, brought back to me the spring when an unidentified woman drowned south of Wimberly: my mother.
I’d been home alone, excited by the freedom at first; wondering what would happen if I called my boyfriend, Andy, to come over. But my daddy had gone fishing up at Lake Travis, which was sure to be flooded, too, and might at any minute pull into the drive. He was usually tanked on beer in those days, and fairly out to lunch when he wasn’t actually in his hardware store gossiping with his customers. He acted as if he thought I was still about ten; and I suspected I could have told him I’d been riding my bike if I stayed out all night, and he’d have believed me. There was this pairing of opposites at home that I couldn’t get a grasp on, with him like that and my mother always talking about teenage pregnancies and the unwanted babies nursing up and down the southern counties of the state. I imagined she’d have secured the pill for me if I’d asked.
She’d driven off that morning before school, waving to me, looking lovely as a film star (looking much like my daughters now, the thick hair, full lips, deep-set eyes, but dark where they were fair). Driven right out despite flash-flood warnings on the radio, and the low-water crossings outside Austin already underwater.
I didn’t consider my mother foolish for heading into it; I never thought her foolish. It seemed to me dedication: an activist on the front line of defense, standing for her rights. Even after Dr. Williams’s office had called in the afternoon to say the clinic at Wimberly had been canceled, I didn’t think her foolhardy to have gone.
When she didn’t come back, when I didn’t hear from Daddy, I turned on the television to get the news, having some halfhearted desire for drama, to have my family caught in the middle of the storm, everyone scared to death, us reunited in the downpour. Daddy, maybe, sobering up, losing his beer gut, getting his head out of the bait bucket long enough to notice we were around; Mother, frightened, chastened, sticking closer to home, perceiving that I, while not sharing the vast problems she daily battled, nevertheless had a few small needs kicking around.
One of the camera shots showed a swollen creek, an uprooted tree, the bumper of a submerged car. This flashed on the screen, held, flashed off, and the commentator reported that an unidentified woman had drowned on the road to Wimberly. I tried calling the bait shop up at Travis, but the lines were down.
By eleven that night, I was on the verge of frantic. I didn’t know who to call. Andy never came to mind; I couldn’t imagine calling his house in the middle of the night; it would appear as if I was presuming on his dad’s connection with my mother, asking for some favor that was out of order. Finally, at midnight, I decided that I’d call a teacher, late as it was, on the excuse that I might have to miss school tomorrow, both parents and their cars being gone; that I’d pick up my homework assignments from someone later. My favorite teacher, Mr. Johnson, taught Civics, but when I looked up Johnson in the phone book there were four pages of them, and although I knew he was called Ed, there were eight Edwards plus Edwins, Edgars, Edmonds, and E.A. through E.W. I also liked Mrs. Brown, my Texas History teacher, but she was married and in those days only the husbands’ names were listed in the phone books. So I decided it had to be Miss Moore. She was right up there with my all-time unfavorites, but I knew her name was Theodora and there couldn’t be many of those, and she was unmarried. Then it was fairly common for women to put only a first initial—this was to discourage obscene callers, but since no man ever listed himself that way, it was a giveaway—so I expected to find T. Moore. But there she was, Theo Moore, and I thought that pretty clever: sounded like a man, but was clear to anybody looking for her.
“Miss Moore,” I said, “I’m sorry to disturb you so late, this is Cile Guest, in your senior English class—”
“Why, yes,” she said, sounding very sleepy, a new concept for Miss Flour Sack. I’d assumed she never slept.
“I’m calling because, well, really, I’m not sure I can make it to class tomorrow.”
“Is anything wrong?”
“My mother’s down south of here and I’m afraid that—that she’s d
rowned.” I hadn’t meant to say that, or maybe I had. Maybe I needed to tell someone.
“Tell me about it.” She was alert now, and I could imagine her making notes in her large curling script on a flowered notepad by the bed.
When I finished, including the part about seeing the bumper of the car on TV, she asked, “Where is your daddy?”
“He went fishing, took off early. Said the rising water made the fish bite.” I didn’t know why I was telling her all that. Stuck a six-pack of Bud in his car and had probably stopped off somewhere and was on his sixth six-pack by that time. Probably Mother was trying to let us know she was fine and had stopped six pregnancies before nightfall but she couldn’t get through. I was talking too much, afraid to put down the phone.
“Now listen, girl, I better come over there. You leave and they won’t know how to reach you. Just sit tight. I need to collect my wits, get my notes for class and something to wear. Are you doing all right? You want me to send over the police? No, not while you’re there alone. We can call the Highway Department, they have those telephone networks. They can find a lost parakeet in the piny woods. Sit tight. Have yourself a glass of fruit juice, that’s a help for shock. Now I’ll be there in twenty minutes, you hear me, and I’ll knock three times. That’s so you won’t be scared to open the door.”
“Do you know where I live?”
“Why sure I do; I know where all my students live.”
She came and got on the phone to the Highway Department and they wanted to know what my mother had been wearing and what she looked like, and within the hour we’d got a confirmation. She’d looked at me and slow fat tears began to crawl down her fat cheeks, and she nodded her head and then looked a question at me, and then said, “You better tell it straight to the girl.” It took another hour to locate Shorty, stranded with a bunch of other fishing nuts, just as I’d guessed, in an all-night truck stop on high ground between the lakes, Travis and Austin. He’d seen the TV, too. It was six in the morning before the roads opened and he could get home—stone sober, his face a pasty white and his mouth sucking air like he was a catfish out of water.
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