Don't Call Me Mother

by Linda Joy Myers

  He murmurs nervously, “I’m not sure if a little girl should take a bath with her father. It’s not proper. It’s different for a mother, but for a father…” His face registers confusion.

  “Oh well, if you don’t want to…” I say, wanting to smooth things out. “But my girlfriends, they see their daddies in the tub, they…” My cheeks grow hot with a shame I don’t fully understand.

  “It’s okay,” Daddy says with a soft voice. “There’s room for you to sit behind me.”

  My feet are cold on the tile floor as I undress. Daddy has agreed, but I still feel anxious, thinking maybe this is a bad thing.

  “You get in first, and then I’ll get in,” Daddy says.

  Bubbling water bursts out into the tub. I fit myself at the back of the tub, leaving room for Daddy. It will all be okay, I tell myself, but something doesn’t feel right. Daddy comes in wearing a towel and turns his back to slip in. I close my eyes after sneaking a look, but with a washcloth in a strategic position, he’s taking no chances. He is jittery and giggling, and I feel I have crossed some kind of line.

  I turn toward the swan spigots, my white legs small and thin beside his long, tanned legs slicked with thick hair. I pretend to be a cheerful, laughing girl, but I feel bad. The bath is brief, and then we get dressed in separate rooms. We go to sleep in the big bed after dinner. He snores, and his body is so huge. I feel small and grateful next to him, but worried. I hope he doesn’t think I’m bad because of my curiosity.

  The next day, Gram takes us to Aunt Helen’s.

  “God love ya,” she says, giving me a squeeze. Gram, Daddy, Aunt Helen, and Uncle Maj chat as if they’ve known each other for a long time. Aunt Helen serves up her fried chicken, gravy, and mashed potatoes, bustling around the room with the energy of a pressure cooker. We must all be family now that Daddy is in her fried chicken club. Gram takes slow puffs from her cigarette, her black eyes fastened on me. Can she tell that today I belong to Daddy?

  They get along, tilting their heads back and laughing over dinner. Gram is really strict about table manners and gives me “the look” that reminds me to hold my fork correctly. She tells me to cut the fried chicken off the bone.

  “Oh, just let her pick it up in her fingers. You’re gonna fancy away that little girl to nothing,” my father says with a wink in my direction.

  Gram’s eyes flash. “Nonsense.” Gram shows me how to cut the chicken, then tells me to do it myself. My knife slips, and a chicken leg flies onto the tablecloth.

  Daddy laughs. “It’s okay, just pick it up. She can’t be a lady all the time.” He winks at Aunt Helen, who winks back.

  Gram’s voice is harsh now with righteousness. “Of course she can. My granddaughter will have good manners and hold her head up in society. Sit up straight, Linda, and don’t chew with your mouth full.”

  Daddy wipes his mouth and excuses himself from the table, his shoes squeaking as he paces the floor. Around the table, flustered hand movements, eye glances. Then he’s out with it.

  “Look here, Frances. I appreciate what you’re doing with Linda Joy—taking care of her, buying her nice dresses—but she’s still a little girl.”

  Doesn’t he know that he shouldn’t say things like that to Gram? She tosses her head and gets up from the table, leaving the rest of us hunkered down.

  “You look here. I am teaching her things that she should know. How dare you criticize me.”

  “I’m just saying let her pick up a piece of goddamn chicken in her fingers. Let her be a little girl. She’s only seven, for Pete’s sake!”

  Uncle Maj’s chair hits the floor with a bang, he gets up so fast. Aunt Helen bustles into the kitchen. Uncle Maj fits himself between Gram and Daddy, tamping tobacco into his pipe. Gram and Daddy give each other a lingering glance, an unreadable look in their eyes.

  Uncle Maj says to Daddy, “Frances took Linda when her mother left, and she raises her just fine.” He looks him straight in the eye. He doesn’t say, “Because you aren’t taking care of her.” He doesn’t say, “We’ve got her here now, and we’re all looking after her.” But he does.

  Gram plucks a cigarette from her pack of Kents and saunters over to Daddy, who fishes out his lighter. Daddy and Gram stand close, her hair touching his eyebrows as she sucks in her cheeks. She sits down and swings her leg, staring off as if nothing mattered. Daddy heads to the kitchen to ask Aunt Helen how she made her delicious gravy. The storm has passed.

  After dinner, Gram, Daddy, and Aunt Helen sit chatting and laughing in the living room. I worry about the train coming to Perry too soon, to take away my daddy. I watch the gold balls of a clock covered by a glass dome roll back and forth, stealing minutes from my time with him. After listening to them for a long time, my jealousy rises like mercury in a thermometer. I want him to myself. Don’t they realize that I don’t get Daddy again until next year? The ache of his leaving fills my body.

  To console myself, I follow Uncle Maj outside to putter in the garden. Thick storm clouds gather in the darkening sky. Uncle Maj’s white hair sticks up in the wind, and his face is red from working hard. A thorn sticks his thumb, and I touch his hand. “You’re hurt, Uncle Maj. Let me get a Band-Aid.”

  “Oh, it happens all the time. I don’t mind bleeding once in a while for my beauties. Here, put these gloves on. You can help me.”

  He teaches me how to loosen the soil from the roots, and how to angle the cuts as he trims the roses. “If you cut the roses back hard, they’ll burst into a fuller bloom in spring. Sometimes cutting things back is a way to make them bloom better.”

  I yearn for the spring, the yellow daffodils and the roses. I sense that there is a right time for everything, but never for Daddy leaving.

  We all ride in Aunt Helen’s car for the drive to the station. Daddy smiles at me, patting my shoulder, but I can see that his mind is already on Chicago and his exciting life there. I get out of the car at Perry, the wind pushing against my back, blowing me toward my father. I grab his thick, warm hand and brush the hair on his knuckles with the tip of my finger. His Old Spice makes me want to cry and grab at him, begging him to stay, but I just watch the train get bigger as it comes into the station, steeling myself for what I know comes next. The whistle haunts me, warning me to get ready.

  “You be a good girl for your Gram,” he says, then turns his back, his shoes tapping on the bricks as he strides to the train.

  The train roars and trembles. The hard wind reminds me how small I am, and that there is nothing I can do about people leaving. I watch every detail of the leaving ritual, trying to take the ache away. The train men bring in the steel steps, and the conductors wave and whistle. The doors snap shut. My father waves—oh, so happily—from his square window. I memorize him, his wide smile, the gleam of his bald head. I’m ready to live on another year of memories.

  I watch until the train is lost in mist and smoke.

  Liberace

  The roofline of our neighbor’s house creates a triangle of yellow sun on my rug. During a full moon, the triangle is milk-blue but so bright you can read by its light. The Great Plains is like that, heat and light everywhere. Even the storms are exciting, making my blood swell and rush like the wind and the clouds and the boughs of the great trees.

  The neighbors in the house next door are a real family with a mother, a father, a little girl, and even a dog. Sometimes I wish I lived in that bustling house with a real mom and a dad. George comes home every night after working at Sears. Ruth is always sweet, and she’s tender toward Cherie, who is two years younger than me. The dog’s name is Pudgy, a yipping miniature boxer that I’ve grown to love despite the fact that I was bitten by a dog once.

  Ruth and George’s house vaulted to mansion status after they got a television. They’re one of the first families in town to have a TV. Once in a while Ruth invites Gram and me over on a Saturday night to watch Liberace. All our neighbors have variations of the same house—white walls, beige couch, plastic sheets covering pale carpe
ts. The neighbors’ houses are neat, with no newspapers, books, or forgotten bills piled up. Our house is wallpapered with dark green and burgundy flowers, a French design, Gram said. The maroon ceiling seems to press me into the hot wool of our Oriental rug. Sometimes I can hardly breathe.

  Tonight is Liberace time. A smiling Ruth wears an organdy apron and bears a plate of chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies. All of us are entranced by the small, mahogany box and the black-and-white picture: Liberace’s hands swoop up and down the piano; the silver candelabra sparkles. We all know that Gram is nuts about Liberace, with his super-white teeth, his wrists as graceful as a cat’s tail. “Oh, look at those lovely hands. See how he lifts his fingers up and down like pistons,” Gram croons. While Liberace plays, Gram sips her coffee, a look of such wonder and pleasure on her face that I stare at her more than at the TV. The notes of the music make waterfalls of color In my mind, sweeping me into an unfamiliar, beautiful world.

  The next week, on a day so windy that the house creaks, I find Gram tinkering at the piano, trying to play runs like Liberace, lifting her hands high into the air.

  Her dark eyes fasten on me. “Sugar Pie, how would you like to learn piano?”

  The piano entices me with its amber keys, the magic waiting beneath them. Playing the piano will make Gram happy. I wonder if I could play like my mother does. I tell her yes, I want to learn. Gram takes out sheet music with a silver cover. A curvy lady with dark hair leans back against a slick-suited man with a tiny mustache. He meets her sultry look.

  “This is the music for the ‘Third Man Theme,’” Gram says wistfully. “Oh, how I’d love it if you’d play this for me someday.”

  My grandmother at fifty-seven is as glamorous to me as any movie star. She poses, a hand on her hip, her dark hair flowing around her face. She has a faraway look, as if she’s listening to a distant melody. “Ah, this is the music I loved.” She gets up to dance, one hand on her stomach, the other hand on the shoulder of an imaginary dance partner. She takes a few turns around the living room, humming the “Third Man Theme,” cast back into memory.

  “You have no idea, when I lived in Chicago, the kind of life I had, men falling all over each other to dance with me. In those days we danced all night. I wore the most magnificent dresses and shoes with little straps. Ostrich boa over my shoulder… oh. I was escorted home properly, of course, with no funny business. Quite a life. I took ships every year to England. You have no idea…”

  She drifts off, seeing herself before she was a grandmother. I squint my eyes to see that Gram better, trying to imagine her wearing the clothes that hang in her closet—long satin gowns, fancy shoes with ribbons, the ostrich boa I love to stroke. She turns to me, luminous. “If you learn to play the piano, you’ll be very popular. People will invite you to parties; they’ll ask you to play so they can sing and dance. You’ll see.”

  The future spins before my eyes. I want to be the lady on the sheet music, or Gram with a boa flung over her shoulder. I try to imagine the time before I was born and the person I will become, but it’s hazy, like fog on winter wheat fields.

  On Saturday, I meet my new piano teacher, Crystal. She flows through the door of her studio, a white caftan covering her full body, necklaces sparkling on her generous chest. Crystal seats me at a white piano with sticky keys and shows me how to position my hands, while Gram takes notes. Crystal says that musical notes look like black flowers with stems. She shows me the mysterious signs of music—treble and bass clef, half notes and whole notes, the repeat sign, middle C. A world opens up, with its own secret runes.

  After that Gram and I have a new routine: She drives me to lessons each Saturday afternoon; I practice twenty to thirty minutes after school. Each week Gram reminds me what the teacher says from her notes.

  “Lift your wrists like Liberace,” she says, laughing. “What a guy. Wouldn’t it be romantic to have him play just for us?” Her eyes glow with delight.

  In the beginning, it’s fun. The piano, left over from her Chicago days, stands like a proud dowager in our small dining room. The wood is worn; the ivories are discolored. I press keys, listening to the notes and how they create songs. Gram smiles a lot. After a few months, she tells me that we are getting a new piano. A shiny new Baldwin Acrosonic piano, with its shiny polished wood and bright new white keys, is delivered. It smells good, like lemons.

  Then, as the practice sessions grow longer, the piano gets boring. The neighborhood kids play outside, the sound of their laughter drifting in. I want to play games and run in the grass with them, but Gram makes me practice almost all day long. At night after they have gone inside, sometimes I stand in the yard inhaling the sweet smell of the grass, watching the grand sky overhead with all its millions of stars, listening to the chirping of crickets. The huge moon rises overhead, painting the world silver. Alone in this landscape, I forget about the pressure in the house, and about Gram’s strict rules. I’m part of the night, and the land that surrounds us in dust and light.

  The Plains Is

  Our Mother

  It’s June and school is out. Gram tells me that we are going to see her mama. With tears in her eyes, she says that her mother and brothers and sisters live in Iowa, and she misses them. She loads the car with cigarette cartons and suitcases, and puts the down comforter on the floor of the back seat, to protect me if we have an accident.

  The Great Plains is an amber dream, the blue sky a canopy over the flat land that stretches to the far horizon. The wheat fields are ever-undulating seas. It is harvest time for the wheat. Combines lumber up and down the fields spewing golden dust into the air as they cut the long wheat stalks, capturing wheat heads that will be stored in monolithic grain elevators rising from the emptiness of the plains. Every afternoon small clouds grow into huge thunderheads, and the air smells of sulfur. Rain drums the roof of the Rambler, and the windshield wipers bang frantically back and forth. Burma-Shave signs mark our way north.

  The car weaves through Kansas towns like Sedan and Arkansas City. We stop at small cafés, where Gram speaks with her English accent, acting like a world traveler. We order milkshakes or hot fudge sundaes and perch at picnic tables.

  Gram likes to stop at historical monuments on the roadside, where I learn about the Osage Indians and the tall plains grasses, about outlaws and the Civil War. In Coffeyville, where the Dalton gang was captured, we stay at a fancy hotel with high ceilings and crystal chandeliers. I can imagine an hombre swaggering in, ordering a beer at the bar, then shooting out the brass-framed mirrors. Gram tells me that the Missouri River starts out in Montana, where Lewis and Clark found its source. She tells me about Sacajawea and about the pioneer women in wagon trains that came across here, when the plains hadn’t been settled yet.

  “My mama, Blanche, was born a pioneer woman, in 1873.” I wonder about Gram’s mama—what she looks like, if I resemble her. I squeeze my eyes shut and imagine horses running, dust swirling around their flanks. On the way to Iowa, I play with my dolls and imaginary companions, a fairy mother and daughter. The mother never lets the girl out of sight, and I play for hours with the lucky daughter who gets to have her mother with her all the time.

  On the third day of our trip, Gram’s eyes light up and she points eastward. “We’re almost there! Fifty miles to the Mississippi River, the greatest river in the United States. Our family has been living near that river since before your great-great-grandmother was born. That’s where my mama and her mama were born and where I was born.”

  A mist settles over her eyes. I don’t understand her story, but I want to know all about these women and the place that made them.

  The Mississippi

  Valley Cradle

  On the Eisely Hill that overlooks the bottomlands of the Mississippi, a road curves across a wide plain of cornfields and rumbles past roadside fruit and vegetable stands. Gram starts to tell me about the family I am going to meet. “You’ll see—it’s a big family—all the kids that Mama had when I was older.” We turn
into a driveway with the sign “Martin’s Mink Farm.” When Gram toots the horn, people rush down the porch stairs, smiling and waving.

  “That woman with the glasses is Edith, my sister,” Gram tells me in a wavery voice, “and the older one is my mama. Oh, Mama.” Gram opens the door and flings herself into her mama’s arms, tears running down her face. I don’t recognize anyone, but they seem to know me. They hug me one by one, murmuring, “Oh, lookit how she’s grown.” I’m dizzy from so many hugs and the feeling of automatically being part of them.

  A woman with white hair caught under a hairnet wipes tears from her eyes. She’s the oldest person I’ve ever seen, with a hump on her back and wrinkles that crisscross her face. Everyone talks at once. “Lulu’s here. Linda’s here.” They pronounce Gram’s name “Lula.” Aunt Edith wears pink plastic glasses and has dark, tightly curled hair. Willard, her husband, wears a plaid shirt. A pipe dangles from his stained teeth. He pats me on the head. “How’re ya doin’, squirt? Sure have grown.”

  Their son, Billy, looks like his father, with the same face and plaid shirt. I’ve never received so many friendly pats in all my life. The threads of family intertwine around me, making me feel that I belong here even though I have no memory of this place or these people. They keep saying, “Remember Blanche, remember Edith?” I just smile and nod politely.

  Blanche puts a bony arm around my shoulders. She smells like an old washcloth and seems strange, with her wrinkles and thick bones all visible under papery skin. She fixes her watery eyes on me. “Linda Joy! Linda Joy, you’re the pride of your great-grandmother. I named you Joy, you know, because you were my first great-grandchild.”

  I don’t know what to say, but I feel nice and warm, like I’m home.

  Edith leads everyone up the front stairs and into the grand kitchen. The electric stove is new, she tells us. Edith fixes what she calls “a little lunch,” which seems like a huge meal to me—baloney sandwiches, red Jell-O with fruit cocktail, homemade pickles, home-canned peaches, and chocolate cake. Everyone talks all over each other as we sit at the Formica table in the middle of the room. Gram is clearly the star by rights of our trip across the Great Plains.