Queen of the Fall

by Sonja Livingston

  There’s nothing like the way girls look at their mothers.

  How they hang on every word. Nothing is lost on them. Nothing is wasted. The way her mother folds her arms when the girl begins to tell about her day. The way her mother looks out the window when the girl asks about her father. The way her mother taps her cigarette into the overturned wine cap to let down the ashes. Each and every movement. Her mother is a perfect dance, the sweetest ballet—all the feather steps, pirouettes, and fish dives a girl must study in preparation for the world.

  Halladay came to me more than the others.

  People warned me about the overly smart girl and her circumstances before she’d set foot in the school. She was one of the few to be sent to counseling twice a week and would have been sent more if she could. She could be nasty. She sometimes refused to cooperate in the classroom. She could not believe anyone liked her. The child who’d learned too early the maneuvers required to survive her particular circumstances. Only the gladness over her coming baby sister was unguarded. Wide smiles, easy laughs. What they were going to name her, where she would sleep. That baby sister. There were other times, I suppose—rare but not impossible—when she’d trip up and show her age, laughing without caution, letting herself push into me for a hug.

  Then came one of the mothers, slow as sap, big as a tree.

  The woman moved around in such drugged motions that her image was somehow as hard to lock onto as if she’d been quick. Her words came sluiced between thick lips, her eyes sequestered under lids so fleshy they barely opened. But she wanted the best for her kids. That’s what she said, and other than the sad mountain of facts that was her life, I had no reason to doubt it. She showed she wanted the best when she complained about the food baskets I’d delivered, asking, “Why couldn’t y’all get us a ham instead of turkey?” It was Thanksgiving and local food pantries doled out turkeys like Jesus doled out fishes and loaves. She was sick to death of turkey and her lack of gratitude at least showed signs of life.

  In fact, when it came to making demands she could be downright energetic, coming in with a list of her daughters’ sizes, having no shame about milking the school community, who in her mind were rich people, those with good haircuts and health benefits, people who talked about 401ks and things she knew nothing about. What she most needed couldn’t be donated anyway and the children had their own troubles. If their backwoods accents didn’t give them away, their ill-fitting clothes did. And they were, both of them, so very big. Baby Paul Bunyans. Replicas of their swollen mother. How the other children moved away. How the teachers tittered, even while offering up cans of sweet potatoes and new winter coats. There was no stereotype of poverty the girls did not embody—the abusive stepfather, bouts of drinking and work release, the broken-down pick up, all that and more. And yet the youngest child had a certain quality. Something about the smile hanging crooked on her oversized face, the light that came from it, as if she held the sun like a lozenge under her tongue. How fully it shone, that light. She’d learn to work it later—to shut down parts of herself to get through another move, another stepfather’s hands—but back then, the child was simply and inexplicably the brightest light in the eastern Great Lakes.

  So many hard-luck cases. So many mommas with bad boyfriends, so many daddies in jail. And yet in a school building with over a thousand children, most of them were like New Year’s Day. Open, curious, seeking out sun. Look what I made. Ten days until my birthday. I love you. The age-old song of girls and boys:

  One for sorrow, two for mirth;

  Three for a wedding, four for birth;

  Five for silver, six for gold;

  Seven for a secret not to be told.

  I indulge myself, hauling them out here.

  But then they’ve always been here, swinging their feet, just waiting for me to look again in their direction. And though the sight of her hands clasped over her belly pains me, sorrow is no excuse to leave Halladay sitting for so long, a scowl of impatience taking up the better part of her face.

  Is anything quite so withering as the scowl of a nine-year-old girl?

  They are not quick to disapprove, but when they do, you know it. Except for the few rare girls deprived of fashion for religious or economic limitations, nobody understands beauty like a third-grade girl. She’ll look you over from head to toe, taking in the bulky sweater, the plain pants, the outdoor boots. If she’s bold, she’ll say, “Why not change into heels when you’re inside?”

  They will love you anyway, because they are children after all, but most girls learn by the first grade that women are the bearers of beauty in the world and hope against hope that each one will bring them something new. They will stroke your hair when it shines, touch your earrings when they dangle, and offer up smiles when you remember to pack your heels and wear them inside, even—and especially—when it snows.

  One of them made a close study of beauty.

  Blue eyes and dark skin, hair that fell in glossy waves. Stunning in second grade, by fourth she’d learned to stop eating. Her chin might have seemed too sharp were it not for eyes that grew even larger in the hollow face—Disney eyes, big inky pupils nearly masking the irises. She tended toward cruelty, and my time with her involved attempts to distract her from the gossip at which she was supremely adept. How sad, you will think, that terribly thin child already so cold, and I thought so too, and still do, except for the day I stood in the bridal shop in a deep lavender gown, one that had looked so good on the display model—one I’d hoped might be dusky enough for the evening wedding I’d arranged, but for which I’d waited too long to find a dress. A circle of mirrors enfolded me, casting so many reflections that I could no longer see. When I finally looked up from the folds of chiffon, there she was seated on a silk pouf chair.

  We smiled to see each other outside of school and my wearing a dress the color of smoke. “I’m trying to find a last-minute dress,” I said, and she didn’t blink at the fact that I was getting married—she’d been bridesmaid to her mother already. Marriages come and go. She knew this and showed neither surprise nor delight. She just looked at the dress and shook her head, eyes rolling, tooth tugging a lower lip. No, the look said, that will not do. I tried another—white, this time, thinking she’d be taken in by the expected color for brides, but once again, she shook her head no. I was beginning to feel desperate, I’d waited too long and now nothing worked.

  Try another, she said and her aunt shouted from the changing room to ask who she was talking to. My counselor from school, she said, and thank God the third gown, the color of raw silk, brought a smile to her face. That smile, so capable of cutting but also incapable of lying, meant everything just then. How I needed that exquisitely cruel child to save me when I needed to know something of beauty.

  They all saved me.

  Waves from buses, pushing their book bags into my lap to show the grades they’d gotten on their math tests, stopping by to tell about the dog having puppies. Just looking into their faces, just hearing the plans they had for the weekend and the simplicity of their needs (a hug, a song, a game) was the best part of many days.

  Some of them are gone.

  You come to expect the occasional tragedy with a parent—the slow mother collapsing in the street, never to snarl over the contents of a food basket again; the father arrested, put away for the best part of a child’s life. Sometimes though, the girl herself is gone. Illness or worse; then it’s a different matter entirely.

  Sorrow, wilt thou rule my blood,

  Be sometimes lovely like a bride,

  And put thy harsher moods aside,

  If thou wilt have me wise and good.

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  Halladay’s gone.

  The girl who came to me two days a week, sometimes more, sliding her soft belly into a chair and asking to play hangman instead of talking about how she’s treating friends. Sometimes managing little truths that she quickly took back and counted as lies. Can I bring the stuffed racco
on home? Yes, I said, and a few more meetings and a hug goodbye and that was the end of things for me. My final year. The mounting sorrow and the business of schools, the little hands posed for a book’s cover—these things sealed the deal and I left. The years passed, but even five states away I recognized the face when it flashed on my computer screen last fall. Halladay and her new sister. Their father. A gun. The children killed near an Adirondack lake before their father turned the gun on himself.

  There’s more.

  What she wore, the weather that day. Those hands, chipped red polish, pants barely covering the tender slope of belly. Autumn in the Adirondacks. The smell of leaves and wood smoke coming from the cabins nearby, the sound of ducks overhead. There’s more, of course, there’s more. And sometimes I allow myself to think of it. For what is sorrow but the underside of beauty, the long-suffering cousin of joy?

  Now it’s time for a boy.

  So many girls—but they came to me too, the boys. The same stories, told in different ways. Now comes a boy. See his legs grown long this past winter. Notice the teeth, so white and straight for a sixth grader. His last year of elementary school. He has been sick, but after two visits to the school nurse, she calls me up and I walk over to the row of narrow beds and pull back the curtain to his padded cot.

  “Where does it hurt?” I ask, and he says his stomach, a kind of heat, and maybe higher too, in his chest. He hides his face. All I have to say is, “I’d like to hear more about it,” and the tears come and off we go to my office, where he lets it out. The girl, the tall one with a kind smile, the way he sees her in the cafeteria, the way he becomes knotted inside so that he thinks he must be very sick, that surely he will die.

  “You like this girl?” I ask. “Yes,” he says, yes, yes.

  It’s like a gift to explain love to a sixth-grade boy, to promise he’s not dying so much as coming into another way of living. Lovesick. Something like bees swarming his gut. He’s still pink when he leaves my office, but letting himself believe he will live after all. It will hurt to look at her across the length of cafeteria table, it will hurt to see the brightness of her eyes, but yes, he thinks he will stand up and try once again. Brave and brilliant boy. I close the door as he leaves, letting my head down on the surface of the desk. I put my head down, in the little office, and let it rest.

  Brick House

  I

  WHEN I FIRST MET my sister’s father, I asked what he’d seen in my mother all those years before. “She was built,” he said, and I produced a smile that pretended comfort with such talk. His honesty was refreshing, I suppose, and what had I expected him to say? They’d met at a bar, so it wasn’t likely her politics or the perfection of her handwriting that had snared him.

  “Stacked,” he added, as if I hadn’t quite understood the reference to the body my mother had, at different points in her life, shared with both of us. I changed the subject, spewing off a nervous stream of trivia about why some pistachios are dyed red and others aren’t or asking how old he was when he started playing drums. It’s clear to me now that nothing good can ever come from asking someone about his attraction to your mother, but then I could not help myself.

  There were seven children in my family, with nearly as many fathers, and I was forever scraping together clues about how my mother had fashioned so many from just one body. The most basic questions are often the most stunning, and to me, our creations were as astounding as God’s making Adam by emptying his breath into a pile of dust.

  I had little trouble comparing my mother to God in heaven, but stacked? As in a brick house? The song went off in my head. Like any child of the ’70s, I’d moved my body to the Commodores’ hit, memorizing their grunted praises; and though my mother had been open regarding her sexual history—I was my own best evidence that she had no problem attracting men—seeing her as a fixed object was impossible. As the ocean, maybe. As the sky, perhaps, but never a house. Even if it were insisted upon and my mother obliged, flattening herself into four walls and allowing a ceiling to cap off her head—even then, the structure would be rough hewn and temporary; a lean-to along a mountain trail, a teepee fashioned of wild grape vines, a canopy of cattails and purple loosestrife.

  II

  How foolish of those pigs to build houses of straw and stick. We all knew it. Even as preschoolers we shook our heads at their lack of foresight. Nothing like a bunch of wayward pigs to turn four-year-olds into a clutch of hens, screwing our faces when the person reading the story came to the part about sticks and straw, the deliciousness of knowing where it would all lead—I’ll huff and I’ll puff and blow your house down!

  Depending on the version of the story or the humor of the teller, the outcome was either a pile of bacon sandwiches or a series of pigs skittering off to the brother who’d taken the time to build his house right. The books must have been well illustrated because the image is lodged forever in my head; the relief on the faces of the straw and stick pigs as they find refuge inside brick walls, the straight back of the brick-building pig, a slight smile of superiority settling upon his snout.

  We all wanted brick houses, we four-year-olds hearing that story. We understood about wolves, either from personal experience or from fairy tales. The point of the story seemed less about danger than the importance of proper planning and industry. I noticed most of all the way two reckless pigs were saved by the more diligent third, so that the story of the three pigs was also a primer in the necessity of identifying the bricklayer in any group. But whether it made us into builders or seekers, the story held out another promise . It said that security was possible, despite the various wolves that came calling. If only we built our houses with care, or found another who could, we’d be all right.

  As if life could be held at bay by a wall of brick. As if anything were more solid than the running of the wind over a meadow of goldenrod in late August.

  III

  There was a woman, a lawyer appointed by the court, who came to the elementary school where I worked to check on certain kids. The few children unlucky enough to need court-appointed advocates were made luckier by their placement in her caseload. She had buzzed hair and wore a wide leather belt. She was solid as a house, this woman—a brick house, but not in the way the Commodores meant. Hers was a body built not so much for a man as for the care and keeping of others.

  If she was depressed by checking on children whose families had blown apart, she never showed it. The sad stories, the mothers with empty bottles and flying fists, the fathers with loud voices and unflinching blue eyes, they were nothing more than frightened children in the face of this woman. A wall of a woman, she was. And before she left my office, she’d hand over a business card, saying, “Call if anything comes up.” I knew she meant I should call if the child she’d come to see had a need, but what I heard was that I should call if any child who’d ever existed might need support—as if with her capable hands she could not only realign the off-kilter planets of our lives but hold them in place as well.

  Whenever she walked into the counseling office, I thought of gunslingers from old Westerns and Samson before Delilah and other heroes both televised and biblical, in whose strength I’d never allowed myself to believe. But in her, I believed. She could hold the planets in alignment, this woman. She could shake the grit from the night sky and keep the stars properly dusted. And though it’s too much to put on any one person, the tending of the universe, and though I left the school on my own that year and made my way into a different life, there were days when she arrived and I had to keep myself from grabbing hold of her wide belt, letting her pull me away from the cool façade of the school building, and skidding off in whichever direction brick houses travel.

  Klotilde’s Cake

  SHE WAS A NEIGHBOR in Tucson, back when my in-laws lived there with their children, including my new husband when he was a boy. How long-limbed and brown he appears in photographs of their Arizona days, and how much of a retroactive crush I’ve developed on the ten-y
ear old who learned to love the desert after a spring rain. Forty years have come and gone and still he speaks of the crimson tips of flowering ocotillo, the ocean of poppies, the blue lupine, and owl’s clover. But nothing is said of the sadness blossoming in their neighbor. Except when my mother-in-law bakes the cake—the one the neighbor taught her to make, the confection named for her, at least at their house—and tells Klotilde’s story as it is cut and served, the feelings at the table spiraling as we bite into its rum-dark layers.

  It’s the story of a husband leaving, returning to the place from which they’d come, Budapest or Prague, a place of statue-lined bridges and gilded spires thrown about like wedding cakes, which brings us back to Klotilde and the cake my mother-in-law serves as she remembers the woman, her voice pulling against the strings of the story. And oh, the loneliness of whipped cream, the anguish of broken eggs, the heartache of sugar folded into flour. It’s there, the despondency of baked goods, if only one consents to notice.

  My mother-in-law has eyes like the blue of Dutch pottery and sits quiet while we eat the cake. When I make naïve statements suggesting that perhaps things were not as bad as they seemed for Klotilde—maybe her husband came back or she met someone new or took up a meaningful hobby, eventually forgetting him altogether—my mother-in-law only shakes her head. “No,” she says. “No.” She doesn’t humor me, does not take hold of the branch extended by offering even a half-hearted maybe so. This I notice, because more than anything, my mother-in-law refuses to be deflated.