They finished eating and cleared the plates and sat at the table waiting for what would come next. The furnace started up, rattling the vents in the floor. The kitchen smelled of cooking, but also of something else, a whiff of staleness, airlessness, the house less lived-in now. Her mother poured out more coffee. It was as if the two of them were always on the verge of having a conversation that would explain and reveal everything: Is this what it means to be a wife, a mother, a woman? Is it what you expected? Should I have gone about it differently? But then they covered it over with other conversation, and the moment passed.
So that her mother wondered if they shouldn’t go ahead and wake Matthew up, and Anita said to leave him be, since whenever he woke up, he was going to be cranky.
“I think I hear him,” her mother announced, going out into the hallway. Anita knew that her mother was just anxious to see him, hold him, exclaim over him, and while she was glad to have some respite, someone else to help with him, there was an unwillingness also. He was her child, after all, not some especially desirable toy to be contested.
She heard his waking-up sounds, and her mother coaxing him, lifting him out of the crib he was really too big for, and then the two of them in the bathroom. She wondered if he’d woken up wet. She ought to go see, but she couldn’t make herself get out of the chair just yet. All the food had made her drowsy.
Matthew was calling for her, Mommy, Mommy. “I’m right here, honey,” she answered, still not getting up. Her mother’s voice kept up its soothing stream of talk, and Matthew squalled a little—cranky—and then her mother came in carrying him. He squirmed to get to Anita. “All right, Matthew, I didn’t go anywhere. I bet you’re hungry, huh? Is Matthew hungry?”
“Would he like any ham and scalloped potatoes? I have some left over from last night.”
“Mom, I brought SpaghettiOs.” Anita balanced him on her hip and searched her carryall for the Tupperware container that held his lunch. With one hand she extracted the food, carried it to the microwave, and set it to warming. The microwave had been a Christmas present last year from her and Jeff. She suspected her parents never used it.
“Big bite,” she told him, once he was strapped in the booster seat and a bib was in place. He opened, chewed, swallowed obediently. Her mother began hauling out the different baskets, boxes, and casseroles she’d prepared. There were stuffed pork chops and sweet potatoes and rice fancied up with sliced green olives. Baked beans and barbecued chicken. Corn pudding. Spaghetti sauce with meatballs packed in an old ice cream container. An apple pie and a tin of chocolate chip cookies and Matthew could have one if he finished his lunch like a good boy.
“This is more food than Martha could eat in a month.”
“Somebody’ll get to it. Besides, just the smell of food, good, plain, home-cooked food, cheers you up.”
Anita gave Matthew half a chocolate chip cookie. He put it all in his mouth at once, so that she had to extract it and break it in half again. “All that missed me. Cooking. I never get anything to turn out right.”
Her mother patted her shoulder. “You don’t need to cook. You can just be beautiful.”
She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Her mother made beautiful sound like a consolation prize. Besides, she didn’t think of herself that way anymore. Beautiful was a long time ago, before she’d got pregnant with Matthew, back when she had more than two minutes to look in a mirror.
When they began carrying the food out to the car, her mother announced that maybe she wouldn’t go along.
“Mom.”
“Matthew could stay here with me so he doesn’t have to spend all that time in the car.”
“I’m not going by myself, Mom.”
Her mother was searching the cupboards for some forgotten item, opening one door after another. “Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s probably better if . . .”
“No, we made a plan and we’re going to stick to it. This was your idea! Don’t you want to see Martha?” Of course Anita didn’t really want to see Martha herself, but you didn’t have to go into all that.
“I can’t.” Her mother shook her head.
“Mom! This is dumb! Do you even go to the grocery anymore? Do you go to church?”
“Of course I go to church.”
“When’s the last time you drove your car, huh?”
“Torrie drives it. Half the time it’s not even here.”
Matthew had been released from his booster chair and was careening around the kitchen. “Gmma!” he announced, hobbling her legs. “Gmma!”
“That’s right, you are Grandma’s very own precious boy.”
“Maybe you should go talk to somebody,” Anita said, although her mother was making a big fuss over Matthew as a way of ignoring her. And even as she spoke, she was aware it was a dumb thing to say. How did you get somebody who never wanted to leave the house in the first place to get out and talk to a counselor? She guessed that was what she’d meant, a counselor. She’d never been to one herself but she knew that people did such things. She tried to imagine her mother sitting in some depressing office and crying into a Kleenex and talking about her problems. What would she talk about, anyway? She never did anything anymore, that was her problem.
Anita said, “Come on, Mom. It’s Jeff’s car. You’ll feel like you’re sitting on the couch the whole way there and back.”
“Matthew, do you want to stay here with Grandma and help me make more cookies?”
“He’s not staying here. And I won’t bring him anymore if you won’t go with us.”
She didn’t mean it, or maybe she did just then, but anyway, it worked. Her mother sat, tense, rigid, expiring, in the car’s front seat with her purse clamped in the center of her lap. Even Matthew’s squalling away behind them didn’t bring her around. Anita felt bad and guilty and exasperated. What were you supposed to do when people stopped making sense?
The big car rolled north, through the straggling edge of town: the old grain elevator, long disused; the barn fancied up to sell antiques; the drive-in, Closed For The Season, the C and F drooping off the marquee. All you ever saw from the road was the back of the screen, a giant bare space and scaffolding.
She hadn’t been one of those girls who did things at drive-ins. She tried to remember why all of that had seemed so important back then. Making sure you were not a certain kind of girl, that you were not for an instant confused with certain kinds of girls. What difference had it all made? Matthew screamed and kicked his heels against the seat. “Matthew, stop that, Mommy can’t drive when you do that!” Didn’t they all wind up pretty much the same, trying to bargain with some furious child for five minutes of peace?
Her mother said, “You were never like that.”
The muscles in Anita’s arms jumped, and the car’s steering overreacted. She had to pull back from the shoulder. “Like what?”
“The temper tantrums. The boys were the worst. Even Torrie had her moments. Not you. You were always happy with the way things were.”
“That’s probably because I was the only kid in the house.” She was always cautious when her mother started telling stories she couldn’t bear witness to or contradict, even if she was glad that her mother was perking up, coming out of her difficult state and back to her normal chatterbox self. The hard part was just getting her out the door in the first place. “Would you look in my bag, give him a toy? The frog that makes frog noises?”
“I think,” her mother said, once the frog had been located and administered, “that you just always knew you were born to be the queen.”
“Yeah, right, that’s me. Queen.” She laughed, an indelicate, snorting sound.
Matthew talked to his frog. Her mother remarked on the comfort and space of Jeff’s car, and it wasn’t a very cheerful day, was it, all those clouds. Anita thought her mother kept up her conversational noise to deflect the more difficult, embarrassing topics, as she’d always done. It depressed her to think that, aside from this peculiar remark about queen
s, she couldn’t remember one important or necessary thing her mother had ever said.
Quickly, before she could change her mind, she said, “Have you ever thought about maybe getting some kind of a job?”
Her mother looked startled. “What would I do?”
“I don’t know. Something you’d enjoy. Be a children’s librarian. Bake stuff, you could bake cakes and decorate them. People always want fancy cakes for birthdays and things.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Jeff could help you.” Anita doubted this, but she wanted to sound encouraging. “You could be the boss.”
“I don’t think I’m the boss type, honey.”
There was no way to argue with that, so Anita let it drop. She thought her mother was done talking about it too, but a couple miles down the road she said, “Why is it everybody thinks I ought to get some kind of job?”
“Who’s everybody?”
“Torrie. She thinks I should take education courses and teach elementary school.”
This was news to Anita, but it sounded like her sister. Torrie was always the one with the upsetting ideas, like deciding she was a vegetarian. “Well, you could do that. If you think you’d like it.”
“Oh, I don’t know. It used to be good enough if you kept a clean house and did right by your children and now you’re supposed to go out and be some kind of world-beater.”
“You’re not supposed to do anything, Mom. Forget I mentioned it.”
“It’s the ones who have some kind of grudge against men. They’ll never be happy no matter what they do.”
“You’re probably right, Mom.”
The sky and rough wind gave the landscape an unfriendly look. Every so often they passed a stand of corn that hadn’t yet been taken down. They were almost to Norm and Martha’s place. That’s what people still called it. How long after they were both gone would it still keep the name? Probably until everybody who’d known them was gone too, or maybe a while after that, until the next generation died off and the forgetting was complete.
“Look, Matthew, we’re at the farm! Do you see any cows?”
“Cows!”
A small group of black-and-white Holsteins in a pasture, standing around in typical dumb-cow fashion. Norm and Martha had kept a herd of fifty, but most of those had been sold off or taken over by other farming kin. They’d grown hay and corn for silage and a couple of acres of sweet corn, kept chickens, canned vegetables from their garden plot, put up fruit from the apple and sour-cherry trees.
Her mother puckered her forehead. “It looks different somehow.”
“I don’t think so. Well, nobody did much with the garden this year.” People like her parents decorated their houses with fanciful things that were supposed to remind you of farmhouses, like seasonal front-door wreaths, or a mailbox made out of a pump handle, or a miniature wishing well in the front yard. Maybe somewhere there were farms like that. But Norm and Martha’s was all business. A rhubarb patch, an asparagus patch. A clothesline. For decoration, Norm had nailed his old license plates to the barn wall.
The lawn had been mowed, the white farmhouse sat as always in its square of windbreak trees. The cow barn, hay barn, silo, and all the other sheds and outbuildings were the same. A manure spreader was visible in a far field, one of Pat’s grown kids, probably Art, keeping up with the chores. If things seemed different, diminished, it was only because you knew what had happened here and what was going to happen.
As soon as the car stopped, her mother got out and hurried inside with those food items that were in immediate danger of spoilage or bacteria growth and so might poison them all. Matthew wanted to climb the steps to the front porch himself, and Anita went behind him, ready to catch him or haul him up as needed. Finally they reached the long, dim hallway. It was as if she’d traveled a distance of lives since she’d left home this morning, from her own new and splendid house to her parents’ smaller, fustier one, and now this plain old workhorse farm. She had the feeling that if she went any farther down the road, she might come across a sod hut.
The front-door transom had small squares of thick colored glass, red and blue and yellow, set around a central clear pane. A flight of stairs led up to the second floor. Like everything else in the house, they seemed undersize and narrow, the center of each wooden step shining with a crescent of wear. She guided Matthew past the front room and the dining room. The sofa of lumpy plush, the big gleaming dining-room table with a doily of stiffened, crocheted lace placed at its center. The piano, out of tune for as long as Anita could remember, with its framed family photographs on top.
She heard her mother and Pat in the kitchen. “Come on, Matthew, let’s go see what Grandma’s doing.”
He wouldn’t remember any of it, he was too young. Not the cows, or the whitewashed milking parlor, or the barn smell that inevitably seeped inside the house, or the grape arbor, or the old stereopticon with its 3-D pictures of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Grand Canyon, and certainly not Martha herself.
“Here he is!”
“Matthew!”
Her mother and Pat swooped down on him. He blinked, then his face crumpled and he began to wail. “It’s OK, honey.” Anita picked him up. He was getting so big. Her back always hurt these days. “He just didn’t know where he was for a minute.”
Pat said she didn’t mean to scare him. He wasn’t a scaredy-cat, was he? Everyone said that Pat looked like Martha, but she really resembled Norm. She had his reddish hair and lashless eyes and round chin, and of course she was freakishly tall, like all the Peersons. Pat was older than Anita’s mother, past sixty, just as her children were older than Anita and her siblings. Everybody was about a half a generation off.
“How is—,” Anita began, but Pat shook her head ever so slightly, meaning, Not now.
Her mother had already started back out to the car to bring in the rest of the food. Pat said she’d help. “Do you need anything for him?” she asked Anita, and Anita said no thanks, she’d brought juice and some graham crackers.
Pat nodded. She had the Peerson mannerism of seeming to be judgmental by withholding judgment. It was as if Anita had announced she’d brought a thermos of rum daiquiris for her child. “Coffee if you want it,” Pat said on her way out.
She’d forgotten how bad their coffee was. For one thing the house had well water, another layer of smell in the rooms, whiffs of sewer or sulfur. She remembered visits as a child when she was told ahead of time, sternly, that she was not to complain about the taste of the water at Uncle Norm and Aunt Martha’s. Maybe this was why they always made their coffee strong enough to float an egg. She took one sip, then poured the rest of her cup into the sink.
It was hard to find a place for all her mother’s food in the old-fashioned refrigerator and freezer. It was like everything else in the kitchen, worn down long past the point where anyone else would have thrown it all out and started over. So there were bent spatulas, and pots and pans black and misshapen and scoured back into use, and these thin and shrunken dish towels, and the porcelain sink with the finish rubbed away, and the old soup can that collected grease drippings, for what purpose Anita would rather not know.
Pat said, “Why don’t I go up and see if she’s awake? Hey, Mr. Boy, here’s something for you to play with.” She put a basket of cookie cutters on the floor and Matthew set about scattering them. Anita recognized the shapes from different holidays: heart, star, diamond, angel, snowflake. Duck, rabbit, autumn leaves. Martha used to make sugar cookies with butter frosting, tinted and decorated with colored sugars and sprinkles.
They heard Pat on the stairs, then her footsteps above them. Anita’s mother said, “There’s a visiting nurse that comes by twice a week, but mostly it’s just Pat. She cleans her and changes her and gives her the pain shots and all the rest.”
“She gives her shots?” Anita asked, mostly so she wouldn’t have to think about the cleaning and changing parts.
“Well, you give cows and e
verything else shots on a farm. It’s not any different. I used to help my dad inoculate the hogs for scours.”
“Ugh.” Anita shook her head. Even the words, hogs, scours, sounded, as kids said, gross. It was hard to imagine her mother, with her clunky, plastic-framed glasses and strawberry-print blouse and arch-support shoes ever doing any such thing. What if she herself was called on to nurse her mother through some completely embarrassing illness? She just wouldn’t be able to do it. But then, it wouldn’t be expected of her. People went into hospitals nowadays and got themselves taken care of there. Only the Peersons took such things on. Laboring and suffering was what they did best.
Pat came back downstairs. “You can go on up. She had her pain shot about an hour ago, so she’s good. When she first gets it, she’s a little foggy.”
“Should Matthew . . .”
“Oh sure. She’ll get such a kick out of him.”
Anita gathered him up. He wouldn’t let go of the rabbit cookie cutter, so it came along with him. The stairs were steep and hard to manage. Her mother was behind her, puffing a little. They wouldn’t be staying long, she was pretty sure.
Martha was propped up in bed on one of those backrests with padded sides. Her face was shrunken down in a way that made Anita think of a piece of fruit left out too long.
“Audrey,” Martha said. “And Anita. And who’s this young man?” She held out her long, bruised arms. Gauze pads were taped in place over each wrist. Her voice had sand in it, a rasp. She sounded like someone else.
“Matthew, say hello to Aunt Martha.” Now that Anita had seen her, and the dread of it was over, she felt oddly calm, energized, ready to be one of those skilled and helpful women who managed things at times of crisis. She’d seen what dying looked like now. It wasn’t as bad as she’d imagined.
The Year We Left Home: A Novel Page 9
