“I try so hard, and no one appreciates it,” she’d say. “It’s shit.”
“I don’t want to be a girl,” I said to John’s mother.
“Oh, but being a girl is so much fun, you get to grow up to be beautiful and have babies,” she said.
“No,” I said. Those things were not much of a selling point, given Mama’s situation. Papa, on the other hand, had always been excited about something. It wasn’t necessarily the things I wanted him to be excited about, like reading The Lord of the Rings to me or playing the games I wanted, but at least he was full of enthusiasm for the world around him. He glowed with the energy of being in charge of his life, even if life had other ideas.
In his absence, I decided I would be in charge, too, I would be a boy. I read a book that explained that the way to get something was to pray for it every day. You simply had to repeat the wish hundreds of times. If you did this, it would come true.
“I wish I was a boy,” I whispered to try it out, amazed at how simple it was. I sat on the swing under the ash tree by the farmhouse and pumped my legs back and forth as I repeated my prayer. I wish I was a boy. I wish I was a boy. I wish I was a boy. Sometimes I worried that becoming a boy might be irreversible, so I stopped wishing. Deep down I knew, as Papa said, that anything was possible.
Spring returned, though we no longer found much joy in the white-throat’s arrival.
However, one morning, as I lay in my bunk, the good feeling returned. It hadn’t come in a while, and I was afraid I would scare it away because you can’t feel the good feeling and be aware of it at the same time. I was thinking about the way light creates the shapes of things, when suddenly I felt it, like a smooth stone in my mouth. My body dissolved its boundaries and became part of all things. Just as suddenly the feeling was gone, and I was me again, lying in my bunk as the ache of reality returned. Mama was always angry, Clara crying, Heidi dead, and Papa gone. Today was my ninth birthday, but not really. My birthday was October 10 now, because John said fall birthdays were better than spring birthdays.
The floorboards creaked as Mama drifted into the kitchen. From above in the bunk she looked soft in the light, her face still open from sleep, not closed up like during the day.
“Mama.”
“Ummmm?”
“Do you ever get the good feeling when you first wake up in the mornings?”
“The good feeling?”
“Yeah, like a smooth stone in your mouth?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“Like warm light surrounding your body.”
“That sounds nice.”
“Do you get that?”
“Not recently.”
“Why do I get it? Where does it come from?”
“I’m not sure.”
I lay back down and tried to make the feeling come back.
“Happy birthday,” Mama said. She was lighting the stove. Smoke puffed up, and the oaky smell filled my nose.
“It’s not my birthday,” I said. “My birthday is in October.”
“If anyone knows what day your birthday is, it would be me,” Mama said, her voice sounding like the old Mama. “I gave birth to you right here in this cabin nine years ago.”
“Really?” I said, interested before remembering to deny it. “But not in April, in October.”
“Nope. It was April. The roads were muddy, and the midwife almost couldn’t get through. You slid right out. The umbilical cord was around your neck, but you were sucking your thumb. The midwife cut the cord and said you were a girl. Then Papa put you on my boob, and you started to nurse.”
“Really?” I said again. A story like that was almost too good to deny. “But I’m not a girl.”
“Whatever you say,” Mama said.
When John and I got off the bus on spring afternoons, the sun shone through the leaves of the birch trees below his house to fill our favorite glade with yellow light. Something about the light made me want to run to the rock where you could see the ocean.
“Where are you going?” John called.
I kept on up the path, so he came after me. When we got to the top, we climbed onto the rock and sat, out of breath, looking over the trees to the sea.
“Paul said we should kiss,” John said into the silence.
“No way,” I said, but part of me thought this sounded good.
“Let’s pull our hats down over our mouths,” John said, and we did. We reached out into the space between us and giggled. He pushed his hat face against my hat face, paused for second, and then scrambled off the rock and up the path toward his house. The birch leaves tittered all around.
“Wait,” I called, hat still over my face.
Soon after that John told me he was leaving for good.
“The people we rented to in September left the end of May,” Helen wrote about John’s family in a letter to some friends. “The winter was too much for them, and they weren’t up to the work or the place. They thought homesteading would be a lark, but they did little more than ride their car around and watch TV.”
Sometime after, there was a gathering to determine who should buy the Nearings’ old house. Our former apprentice, Michael, father of my young friend Heather, came up and gave a speech in favor of Stan, another onetime apprentice who would resurrect that old farm to liveliness, despite Helen’s complaints that he was too fun-loving.
Papa returned in May with Skates and Gerry to celebrate Clara’s second birthday and pick up Pumpkin the cow and other items in his new truck. Skates was not one to be easily upset, but she was certainly unsettled after the tragic events of her last visit. And then, when helping Papa chop wood, Skates swung the ax back and slashed Pumpkin’s soft nose. The cow was fine, but Skates would never return to Greenwood Farm.
I suppose that final summer of 1978 was as warm and lovely as all the summers. It was the summer the world’s first test-tube baby was born, and Pope Paul VI died. The long days stretched into warm nights, the flash of fireflies and phosphorescence in June fading into the humid days of July and the honey warmth of August, when everything ripened and fell from the vines. But something was shifting in the world, reflected in the changes all around me. The spirit was gone, moved on—back to the cities. Only the hardy and slow remained.
The farmhouse was dusty and cluttery, but safe, because all of our remaining numbers were accounted for. Clara was napping, and Mama was standing on her head on a folded towel. Her elbows rested on the floor and her hands were clasped behind her neck, hair splayed out in broken wings, as her body rose straight upward in T-shirt and jeans to bare toes pointing at the ceiling. When I tried to do a headstand beside her, it made my head want to split open.
“You must really need your space to stay like that so long,” I said.
Her eyes were upside down, watching, steady and mutinous. She wouldn’t speak to me when she was in a headstand. A headstand was her time.
“Mama,” I said, “I’m hungry.”
Nothing, so I tried a different tactic.
“Mama, are you hungry?” I asked, hoping to get Mama to eat so she would have energy for me and not be “low blood sugar.”
“Try some, try some, you will like it, you will see,” I begged like Sam in the book Green Eggs and Ham, but her silence always said, “You let me be.”
When she righted herself, Mama reminded me that headstands were good for her hormones, her aching back, her stressed shoulders, all her aches and stresses, really, the house, the garden, us kids. Paul was helping her, she said, but Pam was mostly taking care of baby Mariah, and the farm was too much work for her and Paul. She stopped her monologue to ask me to wash my bowl, and when I didn’t reply, she said we needed to work on “communication.”
“Maybe I’m having my time now,” I said.
“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m the pare
nt here.”
As much as I wanted to say, No, she was not the parent, I knew there were laws of love, and the first is this: we owe our lives to our parents because they gave us life. Whenever I looked at the photo albums that documented our earlier years, I saw the mother she had been, standing next to me by the goat pen, wheeling me and Heidi in the wheelbarrow, and the pictures I loved best, of Mama and Papa taking turns pulling me across the black ice of the blueberry field in a little bushel basket. So I washed my bowl.
Mama was suffering the death of a child and the loss of her husband and marriage, but none of that made sense to the child I was then. She was simply no longer the mother I desperately needed.
“I’m having trouble coping,” she told Paul. “I’m just not sure I can hack it.”
Her eyes looked big and whirly a lot of the time, like they weren’t seeing what was in front of her, and a vein often pulsed visibly just under the skin of her forehead. There was a lack of focus to her movements, as if she didn’t know what she was going to do next. One time she walked out of the cabin and stood in the yard, wailing into the space of the clearing.
“Mama, what’s wrong?” I called out the door to her.
“I’m just getting my emotions out,” she said when she finally came in. She didn’t seem to think it was odd to scream like that. Sometimes we went down to visit Stan, who was camped in his silver camper behind the Nearings’ old house, the Gray House, everyone called it now, and he’d get Mama stoned. Mama and Stan had a good rapport, though she teased him that he was trying to get in her pants. “You’re so tightly wound,” he said, “a little toke will help you let go.” Getting high gave her the nervous giggles, and fat jokes would make her laugh until she cried. Stan had a party at the Gray House with regular brownies for the kids and hash brownies for the adults, but by the time we arrived, there were only adult brownies left. I ate a good number of those adult brownies, and Mama did, too, as we didn’t know there were supposed to be two kinds. I was wearing a baseball cap, and soon felt like pulling it low down over my head so the brim made a beak.
“I’m Donald Duck,” I repeated in a nasal voice, making use of the bits of pop culture gleaned from John. I ran in circles around Mama, hat over my eyes, flapping my elbows and waddling like I was too fat to walk. Mama laughed until her cheeks were wet with tears.
“Look at me, I’m Mama,” I said, turning my lips down to make a frown face as I walked around the addition in Mama’s boots. They were tall, up to the middle of my thighs, green rubber browned by dried dirt, with two small flaps through which dirty laces were tied in an old knot that never got untied.
“Me try,” Clara said.
“Ha,” I snorted. “You’re too little. The boots won’t fit on your short legs.”
“Whoaa,” I said, pretending to almost fall out the back door. It was warm out, but the cooler air of evening lay in wait.
“Me, me,” Clara said.
She’d been playing with my Sunshine Kids on the floor, which I didn’t care about because even though they were supposed to be natural dolls, we didn’t have things like the empty toilet paper rolls to make their furniture.
“No, you play with the dolls,” I said.
“Me wanna Mama,” Clara said, hugging onto my booted leg.
“Oh, I’m just soooo tired,” I said for added Mama effect. “I really can’t fo-cus on you right now.” The boots clunk-clunked on the wooden floor as I walked slowly away from the door, head drooping, Clara leeching onto my leg. Mama was clinking in the kitchen, not listening to us.
“Well, okay, you can try,” I said at last. She wasn’t used to me letting her do things. Usually all she got was, Can’t come, can’t have, don’t follow, don’t take.
When Anner and young Gaboo showed up, stopping by on the way to visit Brett next door, Clara was on the ground behind the house, Mama crouching over her. Anner instinctually lifted Clara onto her lap and pressed her shirt into her chin to stop the bleeding.
“It’s a good cut,” she said. Mama shifted back and forth on her feet, back and forth.
“She cut it on the bucket,” I said. I looked at the rusty bucket. There was a little bit of blood on the sharp tab with the hole that held the handle. “She fell out the door in Mama’s boots.” My fault, of course.
“Has she had her tetanus?” Anner asked Mama.
“Oh . . . yes . . . no . . . yes . . . I think so,” Mama said.
“She probably needs stitches,” Anner said.
“Oh dear,” Mama said. “Oh dear, oh dear.”
“It’s okay,” Anner said. Her eyes went back and forth from Clara to Mama, wondering which one needed the most help.
Anner and Mama put Clara to rest in the bunk and talked over her in low voices.
“You should really get her a tetanus shot just in case. That bucket was rusty . . . just to be safe.”
“Oh. Oh,” Mama said.
“It’s all right.”
“I don’t think I can do this.”
“Do you need help taking her in?”
“No, I mean, I can’t do this.”
“Oh, Sue, it will be fine.”
“No, I can’t bear it. It’s too much.”
Clara sat on my old tree-trunk high chair across the table from me watching Mama with round blue eyes that had dark circles under them. At two years old, she had hair that was still only a pale blond fuzz, making her forehead seem especially high and her eyes extraordinarily blue and bowl-size. They followed Mama’s movements from wood box to stove, from stove to counter, from counter to table with our oatmeal.
“Wait for it to cool,” Mama said, setting the wooden bowls in front of us, “or it will give you bad breath.” Clara began to eat, but her eyes stayed on Mama, even as I made slurping sounds with my oatmeal.
“No slurping, please,” Mama said. “It makes me crazy.”
By then, the times Mama had left took up almost all the fingers on one hand. That first spring with Heidi in the rental car, the next time with Clara when she ended up in Colorado, then last week when she left Clara and me with Anner while delivering a sailboat down the coast with Stan for some much-needed cash. Only my index and pinkie remained. When she left it didn’t hurt at first anymore, like when your hand brushes the hot stove and it takes a few minutes for the spot to sting.
Since Mama returned from the sailing trip, Clara cried about everything. After breakfast, she didn’t want to sit at the table, she didn’t want to get dressed, she just clung to Mama’s legs in the kitchen. Mama told her she was trying to clean up, she needed space. She put Clara on the couch and Clara sat there screaming, her hands reaching out. I went over and showed her my Gandalf staff, but Clara grabbed it and threw it on the floor, so I pinched her. She cried louder and ran to Mama, but Mama put her hands over her ears, her eyes were whirling in her face and her mouth was twisted like in the painting The Scream. She pulled her leg free from Clara’s grasp, slid the latch on the door, and jumped down the step and ran across the yard. Clara stumbled to the open door, her body shaking as she stepped back and forth at the edge like she had to pee. Standing in the middle of the room with my Gandalf staff, I pounded the staff on the floor and squeezed my eyes tight to whisper a spell.
“Mama Come Back.”
Clara dropped to her belly and slid out to the stone doorstep, her face red and crying looking back at me, snot clumped around her nose, eyes not seeing me. She backed off the porch, then started to run after Mama, the sound of crying wailing across the farm. From the door, I saw her trip and fall on her belly, making a louder wah from the impact. I couldn’t see Mama anywhere, so I went to help Clara. It was cool and breezy outside, the sun turning everything the deep golden yellow of late summer. Clara lay facedown on the ground, kicking her feet behind her.
When I pulled her up, her face was covered with dirt mixed with snot. She was wearing a ha
nd-me-down light blue sweatshirt that said BERMUDA, but we called it her MUD shirt because it was so dirty the only letters you could read were the ones in the middle.
I pointed at her chest.
“M-U-D, mud,” I spelled. She looked down so her scarred chin lay on her neck, and some snot from her face drooled onto her shirt.
“Mud,” she said, sniffling. “Mama. Mud.”
“No, just mud,” I said.
After a while she took my hand, and we went inside.
When Mama finally came back, she reheated the leftover oatmeal for lunch and sat, hands holding her head, hair greasy and face blurry, as we ate. The oatmeal was not too hot this time, so we wouldn’t get bad breath, and was perfect for slurping.
“Slurp,” I said.
“Slurp.” Clara imitated me.
Mama got up and went into the back room. We could hear the sounds of her lying down on the bed and pulling up the covers as we slurped.
A bright flickering and sighing consumed the darkness. I was standing in the doorway of the bedroom addition as flames raced across a spill of kerosene on the floor and walls.
“Get back, get back!” Mama shouted at me from where she stood before the fire. “Get back.” But there was nowhere to go that you couldn’t see and hear the spark and hum of the flames as they ate into the floor, the rug, the walls.
A minute or so earlier, I’d been sitting at the table reading as the last glow of orange sank over the tips of the firs above Heidi’s grave. The whirring of the kerosene lantern filled the cabin, its special domed wick glowing with a blue flame. Lighting the lanterns at night always reminded me of Papa, and there was a big space of him missing. The other lantern in the addition was the older kind with the wick and bare flame that you didn’t want to knock over because the kerosene would spill out. Papa said not to pour water onto a kerosene fire, it would mix with the kerosene and burn even more. Mama had been in the back room doing yoga, Clara asleep on the bed. There had been the noises of Mama getting up, moving around, and then something knocking over.
This Life Is in Your Hands Page 27
