“Ma, I may have slept about an hour, that’s all. I know I must look like hell.”
“You look beautiful. Any woman with a baby in her belly can’t help but look beautiful.”
“I agree, Mrs. Jackson,” Rick said as he stood in the doorway that led down the hall to his office. “Did you get any sleep, honey?” he asked as he descended the stairs and started across the room, only to be diverted by the blazeless fireplace. “Let me build you a fire.”
“I’m not sure if I slept,” Ellen said as she watched Rick build a fire. And something simmered warmly in a very visceral part of her that sent tears to well, first, it seemed, in her heart, then in her eyes. A gesture so small, yet so overblown with his love, she thought, and she was so touched that all she could say was, “Thank you, honey.”
Antonia took her daughter’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “Why are you crying, Ellen?”
Should I tell her? Ellen wondered. Certainly, as a woman who’d carried two children, she would understand gratuitous weepiness because, after all, it was one of those enigmatic sacrifices of pregnancy. So she said, “I’ve just been weepy a lot. I guess it’s from not getting any sleep.”
“Oh, well most likely you did sleep,” Antonia said. “Maybe it was shallow, but it was sleep, nonetheless, and that’s better than no sleep at all.”
Ellen glanced over at Rick who had not gotten the fire going yet. So she pressed her eyes into him as if the pressure would make him get it started faster. Just barely minutes after sentimental tears fell for the gesture, she now questioned just why this fire was so all-important, especially since she was anxious to talk to her mother about matters that her husband did not need to hear. “Rick, honey, can you leave the fire alone for a minute and get me something to eat?”
He looked over his shoulder and said, “I’ve just about got it going now, Ellen. Can I get it in a minute?”
“I’d really like it now, Rick,” she said plainly with just a hint of contrition for sending him from the room on a wild-food chase.
So he stood from where he stooped, swiped his hands together, then said, “All right, sweetie. So what do you want?”
“Maybe some pasta with olive oil and a little grated cheese.”
“Okay. Antonia, can I get you anything?”
“Oh, nothing to eat, thank you. I just came from a big lunch so I’m not hungry. You can bring me something warm to drink, though, like some tea.”
“Tea,” he said pointing two fingers at Antonia. “And pasta with olive oil and cheese. I’ll be right back.”
Ellen waited until she knew for certain Rick was in the kitchen before she turned to her mother and said, “Thanks for asking for the tea. That’ll keep him in there for a while.”
“Well, I had the feeling that’s what you wanted. What’s going on? Why’d you want him out of the room?”
Ellen slumped against the high arm of the sofa and softly wept. Then, wiping her tears with the hem of her bathrobe said, “Ma, I’ve been having some awful thoughts lately. Scary thoughts. Thoughts about death and murderers and just plain horrible things that no one about to have a baby should be thinking about. And I worry if I’m going to be able to keep this baby safe from all those awful things that I can’t stop thinking about.” She sat up and wiped the rest of her tears with the back of her hand. Then, with as much composure as she could muster for the moment, she turned to her mother and added, “And I keep thinking about those men who escaped from jail last week. You know, those men who broke into those people’s houses, then robbed them, killed them, and scalped them?”
“Oh, my stars, Ellen. Why in the world do you want to think about those animals?”
“I don’t want to think about them, Ma. I just can’t help myself.”
“Well, you’ve got to now. You don’t want to be thinking about anything so terrible,” Antonia said as her face screwed itself up into a scowl. Then, as if she’d figured out the right thing that would put Ellen at ease, she brightened her face with a near smile and continued, “But to tell you the truth, you’ve always been this way. When you were young, like about the fifth or sixth grade, it got to where your father and I had to stop watching the news altogether because if somebody was murdered, you were certain the killer was on their way to North Avenue in search of you. I don’t know where you got that stuff.”
Ellen stared straight across the room in front of her as a chill tingled its way through her. At that moment, with her mother taking her all the way back to the beginning of her fears, she knew that she had never felt safe. From somewhere in clear air this came to her, the memory of always feeling like a small piece of thread that could irreparably be unraveled to an obliterated, unidentifiable bit of nothingness with the wrong word, or the wrong act, or the will of one man, and then she’d be gone forever. Dispensable. And before she could even begin the struggle within of whether or not to tell her mother, she’d already begun to blurt out, albeit with a quiet flatness, “I’ve never felt safe.”
Antonia looked at her from the corners of her eyes, and asked, “What do you mean, you’ve never felt safe?”
“I mean what I said, Ma. I’ve never felt safe because I’ve always thought that someone could come and take me away. Or make me go away. That somehow death would come to me by the will of someone else, not by God, not even by my own choice to take my life. But it would be evil and ugly and torturous in every conceivable way. I can’t remember when I wasn’t afraid of this, Ma, and now I have to figure out a way to make this baby know that he—” Then she turned to face her mother and matter-of-factly noted, “Oh, by the way, the baby’s a boy.” And without letting her mother emote in any way, she continued, “I’ve got to figure out how to make him feel safe in a world in which I’ve never felt safe myself. No easy task, Ma.”
Antonia’s face had fallen as she stared at Ellen for several long seconds before taking her in her arms and saying, “I just don’t know what to say, Ellen. You’ve always been so together, and so fearless. It never seemed to me that you were afraid of anything. I mean, just look at you. You’re incredible. You’re my incredible, marvelous daughter who can do anything. Why, I was just thinking earlier today about how you just went after everything you ever wanted. Do you know how fearless you have to be to do that?”
And if Ellen could have made that moment solid matter, and tucked it away for whenever she needed reminding, she would have. She would take it out whenever she needed to remember that her mother could have, in times like this, moments of complete and total lucidity; and be the soft place she needed to cushion her fall. But then it would only be counterbalanced, she thought, by the likes of that yellow cat, Tippy the Fourth, which had absolutely no bloodline back to the first Tippy, except in her mother’s abstracted mind. Then there were all the other oddities, like the way she actually seemed to believe in the authenticity of her bogus Bible quotes, and the way she moved furniture around in secrecy. But now here my mother sits, Ellen thought with a sideways smile, the paragon of a mother’s solidness as if her wacky ways were the figment of everyone else’s active imagination given to exaggeration. So she smiled softly, just for the warmth of her mother’s faith in her, and said, “Well, that’s nice, Ma, but they’re just accomplishments. Anybody can accomplish anything. You just have to want it badly enough. It doesn’t take any particular bravery to become a doctor.”
“Yes, that’s true. You do have to want it badly enough, but first you have to be fearless enough to want. Cowards don’t want, Ellen. They sit back and make excuses as to why they can’t get what they want. Not you. You just went after it. You just go after it. And that makes you brave in my book.”
Ellen sighed, and shook her head with the frustration of being unable to really make things clear—to her mother and to herself. It didn’t seem to make much sense to her to continue down a road not even she could navigate. A road that had only been brought into her consciousness by the rush of hormones. So she knew she had to put it all away for another day
’s pondering when she asked her mother, “Ma, when Uncle Emeril died, what was it like for grandma? How did she take it?”
“Oh, honey, why in the world do you want to talk about that now? You don’t need to think about a mother mourning her child when you yourself are about to have a baby.”
“Okay, fine,” Ellen said dismissively. She didn’t need her mother’s protection as much as she needed to hear of the primitiveness of a mother’s grief; because it would have to be raw, like a blistering, festering sore that all the salves on earth or balms in Gilead could never seem to heal. “It’s just that you’ve never talked about how grandma took his death. It was always pretty clear to me how it hurt you, but what about her? I never knew her, I know, but I still want to know.”
Antonia twisted her mouth into a tiny feline-like bow of a smile, as if she were trying to keep herself silent. And as if edginess couldn’t keep her still, she shifted where she sat then recounted, “Well, she never got over it. It was as if she cracked in half the day Emeril died and nothing could put her back together again. She was like that till the day she died. And we couldn’t ever say his name in the house. It was just like Emeril never even lived. Sometimes, I would think I was going out of my mind, having my heart break every minute of the day when I was remembering and grieving with everything in me for somebody who seemed to have never been born, so I would have to look at that picture of us as babies to remind myself that he had lived and had been born right along with me. So that’s why when Daddy died and she acted like it didn’t even matter to her, there was nothing else I could do but marry your father, or else I would have had to stay up in that house and go the rest of the way crazy with Momma. When she died, she hadn’t been in her right mind for years, not remembering anything and forgetting people. Everybody said she was senile, but Momma was too young to have been senile. I think she just died from her grief.”
Ellen looked into her mother’s eyes with an empathy for her pain that had, till now, been elusive. She understood the connection, and as naturally, as basic as air, Uncle Emeril was still the foundation of it all. “I think that’s what’s going to happen to you. You’re going to die from your grief over Uncle Emeril’s death.”
Antonia’s mouth hung open in a way that seemed as if it would be forever void of what to say to Ellen. Then with a laugh that sat on the edge of something that was anything but humorous, she said, “Ellen, what would make you say something like that?”
“Because nothing in the world is going to make you get over his death. That’s why—” She stopped before telling her mother of the plan, because given the state of things—the baby that could come early, those murderers on the loose that won’t let her sleep—she couldn’t possibly be sure of the prudence of anything said or done.
“That’s why what, Ellen? What is it you want to say?”
“Ma, I just don’t think you’ve ever gotten over the death of Uncle Emeril, and as a result, maybe your grief has digressed over the years since he’s died into some sort of obsession with him that makes you also obsess on the outlandish possibility that Clayton Cannon is his son. That’s why Aaron and Poppa agreed with me last night when I suggested that maybe you need to see someone about it all, because it’s gotten so out of hand now. Ma, I want this baby to grow up knowing his grandmother, but more than that, I want his grandmother to know him. I don’t want you to lose your mind and end up dying from grief.”
Antonia got up and went to the window where she stood looking out at the gray and white day. She folded her arms together as if trying to keep herself bound together tightly, then turned to face Ellen with dull and hurt-filled eyes and said, “Ellen, you’ve said things like this before, but I always thought it was just talk. I never in a million years really thought you were serious. So that’s what you all were doing last night over at Aaron’s?”
“Yes. We talked about it, and we agreed that we’d all like some answers so that what you’ve done all these years with the whole Clayton Cannon thing can make sense to us.” Ellen got herself up, with some effort, and went to her mother because she knew she had to get to her mother and touch her, and let her feel the warmth of a daughter’s heart that missed the part of her mother that had been buried with Emeril. So Ellen wedged her arm into the tight fold of her mother’s arms, and when her mother loosened to let her completely in, she held on to Antonia like a child afraid of imagined bogeys in the dark. And when her mother held her in return, it was all complete. “Ma, I don’t want to live with this fear anymore. Can you please do this for me? I just need to know if there’s an explanation for why you can’t live your life without imposing that man Clayton Cannon where he doesn’t belong.”
Antonia squeezed Ellen tighter to her, without showing Ellen her bemused eyes and tightened jaws that implied she possibly had something altogether different on her mind to say other than what she did. “I’ll see whomever you want me to see, Ellen. If it will make you happy or take your fears away and give you peace, I’ll do it. And believe me, I will tell this doctor everything that he needs to know. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for the happiness of my children, and that’s something you’ll learn when you have that baby. But there’s something you need to consider that I don’t think you’ve given any thought to. What if I see this doctor, and he finds me in perfect psychological form? What if your fears aren’t abated after this?”
“What are you asking me, Ma? Are you asking me if I’ll believe that Clayton Cannon is Uncle Emeril’s son if the doctor says you don’t have an unhealthy obsession with him?”
“I suppose that is what I want to know.”
Ellen slid from her mother’s embrace and went slowly back toward her spot on the sofa, hoping that slowness would give her enough time to think about the gorilla sitting arrogantly in the middle of the room to which she’d never paid attention. What would she do? Would the only alternative, she asked herself, be acceptance of her mother’s obsession, which in fact would no longer be an obsession but rather her mother’s truth, possibly? She laughed ironically as she sat, wondering why she hadn’t seen it coming, then said, “I don’t know, Ma.”
“You don’t know because you’ve never thought of any possibility other than me being troubled? Or is it that you don’t know because there’s something that’s keeping you from knowing?”
Ellen lowered her head feeling the full throttle of shame only a mother can impose with nothing more than a disappointed stare. And as she picked nervously at her thumbnail she couldn’t look at the discontent she knew was in her mother’s eyes when she responded sullenly, “I just don’t know, Ma.”
Just as the whistle of the teakettle made its way into the room, the doorbell decided to keep it company. Ellen went to get up, but when her mother started to the door, she settled herself back down and said, “I wonder who that could be?”
“Most likely it’s your father. I asked him to pick me up from here because I took a cab downtown. Some of these roads are still icy and slippery and I didn’t want to drive,” Antonia said as she disappeared into the hallway to open the door.
Ellen heard her father’s voice faintly, then heard the affection of her parents exchanging lip-kisses. And she wondered when it would go away, that prickly chill that would crawl all over the back of her ears and the base of her neck that said, somehow, her parents were doing something so very anti-parent. Just as long as she didn’t have to see it, she thought, the urge to giggle and blush and hide her face would be forever kept at bay. “Hi, Poppa,” she yelled hoping it would end her discomfort by breaking up the affection.
“Hello, sweetheart,” Junior said, walking into the living room behind Antonia, who was carrying his coat. “How’re you doing today?”
“I’m okay, Poppa. I’m just tired as a dog.”
“That’s because she hasn’t gotten any sleep,” Antonia said with a soft compassion as she stood at Junior’s side with her arms crossed, both of them looking down at Ellen from the top of the steps as she sat in th
e valley of the living room.
“Yeah, my mind just keeps going around and around with all kinds of craziness.”
“Well, from what I can remember with your mother, that’s pretty common at the end of the pregnancy. She just couldn’t seem to turn her mind off, thinking about the baby and what she needed to do to get ready. Why, I remember one night, when she was expecting you, she woke me up at three in the morning because she didn’t know anything about the kindergarten teachers down there at Gwynns Falls Elementary school.” He laughed heartily, then turned to Antonia as he descended the steps and asked with the tenderness of his memories, “Do you remember that?”
“Yes, I do, Junior,” Antonia said with an edginess that seemed offended by the effrontery. She followed him down the steps and added, “But you have to think about those things. There are people who do far crazier things when they’re expecting children, particularly when it comes to naming them.”
Junior looked questioningly at Antonia. “Who said anything about naming children?”
“I’m just saying,” she said evenly.
“Well, all I’m saying is that Ellen hadn’t even been born yet, and you were worried about something she wasn’t even going to do for another five years.”
“That’s right,” Antonia said with a definite defiance. “I stood by it then, and I stand by it now.”
Ellen laughed with an absolute abandon of everything that had troubled her. After all these years, she thought with wonderment, after raising two children only to have them pack their worldly possessions and go off all too soon to discover the world on their own, her mother and father were still strong in the fully experienced knowledge of their past, and the propinquity of their present, and the expectation of their future. What they had, she thought as she couldn’t stop herself from grinning at them, was set inside diamond—rock solid, but forever changing with the natural shimmer from the light of life. And when it occurred to her that she was staring, she pulled herself from them and said, “Poppa, come on and sit down. Rick is making me something to eat and getting some tea for Ma. Do you want anything?”
The Color of Family Page 20
