And Give You Peace

by Jessica Treadway

  But I could also imagine her clutching a stuffed tiger in her jail cell to remind her of her babies back home.

  My mother was the only female reporter in the newspaper’s city room. Until she was promoted to general assignment, she started where women writers had always worked before her, in Fashion and Features. For a while, she wrote a column of television reviews, under the pen name of Chan L. Turner. (Just to set the record straight, the column and the pseudonym existed at the newspaper long before she did.) There was a local talent program called Teenage Barn and my mother panned it, based on the performance of a nine-year-old blind girl who, on the night my mother watched the show, sang a song about dead love. My mother didn’t think it was appropriate for such a young girl to be singing dirges, and she said so in print. The Knick received a dozen angry letters, most implying that anyone who could criticize a handicapped child must have stone for a heart, and one woman from Schuylerville recommended that Chan L. Turner be sent on the next slow boat back to China.

  My mother still has those letters, in the old Thom McAn shoe box with her newspaper clippings, old press badges, and the bowling photo—her souvenirs. When she showed them to Justine and me one night (Meggy was still a baby, already asleep), my mother began laughing as she remembered the slow-boat-to-China part. But with the letters spread out in front of her, her face turned flat and I was afraid she was going to cry. They had hurt her feelings; they called her cruel.

  My mother was Chan L. Turner straight out of college, when she was twenty-two. Later, while she was dating and then newly married to my father, she covered hard news: deadly fires, a crash at the Albany airport, cases before the New York State Court of Appeals.

  She became pregnant with me at the time of the newspaper strike in the city. She picketed the downtown office with other reporters, asking for higher wages and better hours. I always liked knowing that I was involved in a protest even before I was born. It made me feel sensitive and special, as if I could detect injustice from the blind side of the womb.

  But instead of raising her salary they laid my mother off, and she didn’t have much to say about it because she was six months gone with me. This was back when you could smoke and drink if you were pregnant, but you had to leave your job. I was born on the first day of spring, a slushy Monday, and they brought me home to the apartment on Morton Avenue, where they had set up a bassinet in the bedroom, under curtains the color of phlegm. I slept in that space under the window for the first months of my life. You will say I can’t possibly recall anything that early, and you will probably be right. But my heart insists it remembers the white of that window, the circle of sun on the sheet in the mornings, and the blunt light of moon through the shade. I remember the feeling of wanting to move, or to be moved, out of the painful brightness and into the balm of gray. After I moved into my own bedroom, my parents would find me bunched at the crib’s foot in the morning, my head under my duck-bordered blanket, turned from the slatted rays.

  Although I could not have known the words then, I had a clear sense of light and shadow, and of frustration, then relief. It is my earliest memory, and I see myself from both above the crib and inside it, the way people who almost die on the surgeon’s table are said to see themselves.

  When I was a freshman in college, taking Introduction to Psychology, I wanted to write a paper on early memories. I asked my friends about what they remembered, and I took notes in the cafeteria and in the common rooms of the dorm. Then my professor told me I had to write about something more relevant, based on library research. I chose conditioning—the dogs, the bells, the spit, and the morsels. I’m not sure what I learned from it that I didn’t know already, but I remember it made me hungry.

  On my own time, not for credit, I continued to ask people about their memories and to write down what I heard. By the end of the semester, I had a folder filled with napkins and scraps of paper, each representing one person’s first impression of this life. It may not have been very scientific, but I did find some consistencies.

  For example, many of the memories involved vivid physical sensations or perceptions of color. My freshman roommate said she’d never forget falling out of her baby carriage when her mother ran over a rock, and landing cheek-first in a snowbank to see the world skewed sideways as the ice bit into her skin. My friend Ruthie said her first memory was of red: of wearing her favorite red corduroy overalls in the car with her mother driving to buy a carton of Winstons in the red-and-white soft pack. “God, I loved those overalls,” Ruthie said, and I looked away when I realized that her eyes held sudden tears.

  My favorite of the memories I elicited was from someone I didn’t even know very well, the boyfriend of a girl who lived down the hall from me at school. We were sitting together in the lounge—he was waiting for her to get out of the shower, and I was ripping haircuts I liked from her copy of Mademoiselle—and when I was finished making a little pile beside me of the magazine heads, I asked him about the first thing he remembered. He thought for a moment, and then he said, “Okay, got it. I was being toilet trained, and my father put me on the little plastic pot, and when I was done he clapped for me—I can’t believe I’m telling you this—and he went to lift me up, but he lost his balance and fell back against the bathroom door. He had just painted the door that morning, and it was still wet. He was wearing a green sweater, and fuzz from the sweater stuck to the wet part of the door. They never did anything to get the fuzz off until we moved, like two years ago.”

  He didn’t ask me why I wanted to know, but he seemed surprised at what he’d told me. “I saw that door every day of my life until I was sixteen, but I didn’t know I remembered how that fuzz got there,” he said.

  Ask anybody: people believe they won’t recall the dimmest, most distant silhouettes, but they will. I have thought about how better off we all might be if the summits of the world could start this way, with an exchange between presidents about the songs their mothers sang them or about sweet naps in the grass.

  My mother stayed home with the three of us until Meggy was in nursery school. To bring in extra income, she worked as a freelance editor of environmental reports for the state. Although they never let us kids know directly, it was clear that my father didn’t make enough money, especially once we moved to Ashmont. For the first eight years of my life, he sold insurance. Then, after we moved from Albany out to Ashmont, he got his realtor’s license. My parents led us to believe it was his decision to leave the insurance agency, but I knew better because I’d overheard them talking in the kitchen one night when they thought I was asleep.

  “I just think it’s the wrong field for you, hon,” my mother had said. “It eats you up. You’re too nice to the customers, you worry about what they can afford.” Her voice was gentle, as if she were explaining something to one of us. “No wonder they can’t keep you on.”

  “I can’t help it,” my father said, and I could hear him drumming his fingertips on the table. They had pieces of paper spread out in front of them, dozens of numbers scribbled in their own hands or printed out on the stark faces of bills.

  “I know you can’t. It’s one of the things I love about you. But let’s face it, you just don’t have the killer instinct.”

  I could hear the papers moving over the sound of my father’s sigh. On the stairs, my foot was falling asleep beneath me. I would have to move soon; my father was already beginning his nightly ritual of checking the locks on the doors and windows, looking under beds and in closets to make sure nobody had sneaked in. “Houses are different from insurance,” he told my mother while sliding the back-door bolt into place. “Real estate I think I could do.” When we moved to Ashmont he got hired by Zenith, which had sold us our house, but within six months he was looking for work again. He ended up selling cars, which was what he was doing—or not doing—when he died.

  The day after I eavesdropped on my parents’ conversation from the top of the stairs, my mother took my sisters and me to our grandparents’ house, a
n hour and a half down the Thruway to the Catskills in the clattery Nova. It was a school day, and that morning I was trying to decide which color tights to wear under my corduroy jumper when my mother came into my bedroom and said, “I’m having an idea.”

  She got up and stood in the doorway, so she could speak to my sisters and me at the same time. “Do you guys want to go to the game farm?” she asked, loudly, so as to be heard over the scratchy sounds of Alice in Wonderland on the child-size phonograph in the playroom. It was a narrated album, and Meggy loved to hear “The Walrus and the Carpenter” over and over again. Sometimes when she was supposed to be taking a nap, we heard her in her room repeating her favorite stanza to herself: But wait a bit, the Oysters cried, Before we have our chat; For some of us are out of breath, And all of us are fat! The last line cracked her up every time, invariably coming out in a giggled shriek.

  When my mother suggested going to the game farm, Justine plucked the needle off the record too fast, and it made a screech. “But what about school?” She was only in first grade, but she was old enough to know what was breaking the rules.

  “Well, it’s up to you.” Our mother bent down to lift Meggy, who had her arms up in the air. “I think it might be a nice day to take a drive and see the animals. It wouldn’t be crowded, the way it always is on the weekends, and we could stop at Grandma and Grandpa’s on the way back.” She looked at me again. “What do you think, Ana?”

  I hesitated. Although I knew you weren’t supposed to admit it, I liked school. We were halfway through Beezus and Ramona in the Monarch Reading Group (we were all named for butterflies), and the weather was still summery; we would be allowed to go out to the playground for recess. The only thing I didn’t like about school was when the hot lunch was spaghetti and Robert Turcio pretended he was eating worms.

  “You love the game farm, Ana,” my mother reminded me, though of course she didn’t have to.

  “But how come you would let us do that?” I was holding my gold tights, rubbing the fabric between my fingers as I tried to figure out why my mother was suggesting we play hooky.

  She set Meggy down on the floor and took my little sister’s hands in her own. Meggy stepped on top of Mom’s feet and hung there, waiting to dance, her face turned up in anticipation and delight. She wore her favorite dress, the one with strawberries on it, and just looking at her made me feel a rush of love pool inside my chest. “Life is short,” my mother said, stepping in a circle with my sister on her toes. When she saw that her words puzzled me, she said, “I mean, we have to make the most of things. Wouldn’t it be a surprise if we went to the game farm today, instead of what we’re all supposed to do? Grandma and Grandpa would be surprised, too, if we stopped by to see them.” She took a tissue out of her pocket to wipe Meggy’s nose.

  “And the best part is, we’d be surprising ourselves.”

  When I was a little older and my mother told me about the job she had as a journalist before I was born, I understood more of what she meant, more of how “surprise” translated for her into “excitement,” the world offering up possibilities you would never have imagined before the unexpected thing happened, before you heard the news. Whenever she talked about her job at the Knick—how the newsroom could be electrified by a phone tip about a fire in Pine Hills or a missing resident from the veterans’ home—I pictured her sitting at her old Underwood as she banged out the story, looking as she did on the press credentials she saved in her souvenir box, her wavy hair pressed close to her head and the eyeglasses with wings turning up at the corners, as if the frames might take off and fly.

  My mother was an intern at a newspaper office on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Almost twenty-five years later, she could still remember the bulletin that had come in over the UPI wire. “Kennedy wounded—perhaps seriously, perhaps fatally—by assassin’s bullet,” she recited, showing off to the people around our table at Thanksgiving dinner, the year before our father and Meggy died. Mom would leave in the spring, but that fall we were still a family, and on Thanksgiving, which fell as it always does near the assassination’s anniversary, we had the usual gathering at our house—my mother’s parents; Aunt Rosemary; Ed and Kay Lonergan and their son Matt. Justine and Meggy had taken Matt into the family room to watch Top Gun, but I lingered at the table to hear everyone else tell their stories about where they were, and what they were doing, when Kennedy was shot.

  My grandparents had just returned home from a church conference on that day in 1963, they remembered, and my grandfather initiated a prayer chain, which was a phone list of people who called each other when someone in the congregation, or the world at large, needed group supplication. (My grandparents took their names off the chain after my father and Meggy died, but I was always afraid to ask them why.) Rosemary, my father’s sister, said she was cutting a typing class to smoke cigarettes in the alley behind the Blaine Secretarial School. My father worked for a tree-cutting service that fall, and one of the other men called the news up to him from the ground. “I thought he said Kennedy was shocked,” my father told us, “and I thought, what’s the big deal?”

  Then it was Kay Lonergan’s turn. “I was in my dorm room, reading Atlas Shrugged,” she began, and Ed cut in, “No, you weren’t.

  “You were having lunch at the Rathskellar with me,” he said. “I can’t believe you don’t remember this—don’t you remember Dave Huff coming in and telling us Kennedy got shot, and I laughed because I thought he was kidding?” Ed had drunk most of the three bottles of wine we’d opened for dinner, along with a couple of Scotches before we sat down, and his voice and color had been rising throughout the meal.

  “I know that’s what you think happened, Ed, but you are sadly mistaken.” Kay’s own voice grew thick with conviction and a little bit of scorn. “I was reading Atlas Shrugged on my bed, and Marcie Keppler came in and started crying. You can call her up and ask her!” she cried, growing more frustrated as her husband shook his head.

  “Well, you could call up Dave Huff, if he hadn’t been killed in Vietnam,” Ed said. “You were right there at the table. They turned on the TV over the bar and we all sat there and got loaded, waiting for the word.”

  “It must have been some other girlfriend, Ed,” Kay told him. She looked at the rest of us with raised eyebrows, as if about to deliver a punch line. “Though we were engaged by then.”

  “It was you, dammit.” He reached for the empty wine bottle and poured the last drops into his glass. The exchange between them had the feel of a tired comedy routine. Nobody said anything for a while then, and I wondered if dinner had been ruined; but when I raised my eyes to steal a look at my father, he winked at me. Later, in the kitchen, Kay told my mother, “I wasn’t with him that day, you know,” and my mother assured her, “I know you weren’t. Men always get things wrong.”

  On the way to the game farm the day we played hooky, Meggy sat beside our mother in the front seat while Justine and I played Spit on the hump in the back. To pass the time we sang, as we always did on road trips. When our father was driving, we stuck to cheerful ones, like “I’ve Got Sixpence” or “Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah.”

  But when she was in the car, my mother let herself sing some of her favorites, which were almost like church hymns, solemn and slow. “’Someone’s crying, my Lord, Kumbaya,’” she would start up after a period of silence, the road rushing by under our wheels. “’Oh, Lord, Kumbaya.’” I remember that even when I was very young I understood why my father found it hard to bear those words, that tune. You couldn’t hear them without feeling more than you might be ready for. Years later when Kay Lonergan suggested that “Kumbaya” be included in the funeral music, it took my mother only a moment to decide against it.

  We did not go to the game farm often, and it was partly because of this that it was one of our favorite places. You walked around on ground spread with sand and sawdust, smelling animal and, on the best days, the rich weight of a coming rain. You went up to the p
ens to pet the goats and the llamas, and tried to get the peacock to fan its tail. In between, you ate popcorn and hot dogs from the snack counters, drank lemonade from a wax-paper cup. Looked at other kids and the grown-ups they were with, and wondered what it would be like to be any of them; went to the bathroom in trailers set on concrete, the walls shaking when you flushed.

  Besides the animals, the game farm had playground toys—slides, swing sets, a jungle gym, and horses fastened to the ground on rusted metal coils. When we arrived, Meggy wanted to ride one of the horses, so my mother held her balanced on top of the plastic saddle. But this was too babyish for Justine and me, and we took turns on the spiral slide, letting out little screams as we wound our way down, even though it was not nearly as scary as we remembered or hoped it to be. When Meggy saw us she wanted to go down, too, so my mother said I could hold my sister in my lap, and Meggy leaned back against my chest and laughed as we slid. At the bottom I caught her, clutched her tight, and stood up before she could fly forward out of my arms.

  After lunch, Justine wanted my mother to take her back to the monkey pens. She liked to imitate their sounds and watch them blink and grin. But the same noise and sight that fascinated Justine made Meggy afraid, so my mother told me to stay with the baby for a few minutes while she went with Justine. Meggy started to cry when she saw my mother leaving, but I took up her hands and put them together in the clapping song she knew from watching Justine and me—Miss Lucy had a baby, she named him Tiny Tim, she put him in the bathtub to see if he could swim—and she let herself be distracted in watching her own pudgy arms make the motions of the game. After a while, she grew restless and wiggled to be let off my lap.

  I watched her chase some pigeons, then turn around in a circle as they became braver and even closed in a little, making her clap and squeal. I got up to throw away my Fudgsicle stick and get a drink from the stone-based fountain, and when I came back to the picnic table where I had been sitting, Meggy was gone.