A Good Distance

by Sarah Willis

  On the third try they drill farther down than he’s ever drilled. Rose is not asked to touch the dynamite, but before he carries it to the rig, her father kneels down on the ground and prays. Following the explosion, there is nothing. Not a drop. It’s 1938. The Depression, which hardly touched her family, is almost over. They lose their home.

  Her father gets a job selling cars. People are buying cars again and he’s a good salesman. They rent a house in a neighborhood across town where the streets are narrow and the lots small. The wallpaper unfurls from the walls, and now and then plaster drops from the ceilings like heavy tears. Rose’s bedroom smells like something is dead under the floor. She’s afraid to go to sleep at night. She can still hear the sound of her father’s prayers, the boom under her feet, the silence of nothing.

  By the time Rose is in sixth grade, her mother’s furs are long gone. Rose goes to public school. There are no special treats for her classmates. Rose is angry at her parents, but is too well brought up to let it show.

  At least I would be angry. My mother never spoke badly of her parents, even though her father left them.

  One night when Rose is twelve, she’s awakened by an earache. She lies still for a while, testing the pain, realizing each throb is the pulse of her heart. Moonlight patterns a cross on her blanket, and she traces this shadow back to the window frame. She wants to just lie here, discover what else she can about her room, and herself, but her ear really hurts.

  Getting out of bed, she starts toward her parents’ bedroom. Angry voices spill out from under the crack of their door. She’s unsure for a moment if it is her parents who are speaking; they never argue. She stands in the hallway, her bare feet on the cold wood floor, good ear tilted in the direction of her parents’ room.

  Yes, that is her father’s voice. “You’re just in love with him. You always have been. Don’t you see what’s going to happen now? He’s going to—”

  Her mother cuts him off. “In love? Is that what you think? That I can’t have an opinion that’s not based on an emotion? Forget it, Henry, I won’t argue this one with you. First, you think he’s out to ruin your business, and now that you don’t have one, you think he’s out to ruin your country?”

  “You’re blind, Francine, if you think this country can survive—”

  “Oh, hush, Henry! Enough!”

  To Rose, the words feel like sharp things breaking. Her mother loves another man. Rose puts her hands over her ears, turns around, and tiptoes back to bed. She dreams she’s in an abandoned castle and her ear hurts.

  For weeks Rose looks to see if her mother’s blouse is buttoned properly when she comes back from the market, searches her underwear drawer for love letters, watches her mother’s face to see if she smiles more often, or has been crying. Months later, as they all sit at the dining room table eating an eggplant casserole, her father says, “If Roosevelt calls for a vote on the draft, I will personally send him a telegram, in no uncertain terms, no matter what you think of the man. This is not our war.” It’s not the words that make her understand everything, but the look her mother gives her father, a look that echos the exact tone of sarcasm that had been in her voice that night they had argued behind the bedroom door.

  But even though she now understands that her mother is not in love with another man, only the president of United States, Rose can never hear the president’s name, or see his picture in the paper, or hear his voice on the radio, without a hot feeling in her chest. This is the man her mother might have loved. A man whom her father hates. What has he done? Why will he be the ruin of them all?

  In eighth grade Rose volunteers on the Roxboro Rocket, the school newspaper. She interviews her classmates, writing their exact words in her notebook. “What do you think about President Roosevelt?” she asks. “Do you think we should go to war?” “What do your parents think?” Rose reads the New York Times. She learns the names of countries she never knew existed, like Moravia and Bohemia, and pronounces them under her breath as she walks to school, tasting the sounds of the world.

  A year later, when Pearl Harbor is bombed, Rose understands exactly what it means. Nothing has to be explained to her, even her father’s abrupt turnaround. Ben, her oldest brother, joins up the next day. Brent, who has already been drafted and is living in Arkansas at a training camp, writes home that he’s packing up to move out. Rose interviews her father for the school paper. He says he would join up himself if he weren’t too old. She asks him how old he is, and he tells her that’s none of her business. She asks him what he thinks about President Roosevelt, and he says, “I am very proud of our president.” Pushing her luck, she asks him who he voted for in the last election. He says, “That’s enough now. Go to bed.”

  Her mother, standing under the arch between the kitchen and dining room, holding a dish towel, winks at Rose. It is the only time her mother has ever winked at her. Forever after, a wink reminds Rose of bombs and the beginning of war.

  Although her father now loves the president, people stop buying cars because they can’t get gas or parts. He finds a job selling insurance, and a second job selling Bibles. He’s bold enough to offer them both at the same time. He actually makes good money. He leaves the house humming “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  Rose’s mother has donated most of her pots and pans for the war effort, but there are still a few left. Kneeling down on the kitchen floor, Rose opens the cupboard and hands a saucepan to her mother, who places it in a cardboard box. There’s only one more saucepan and a well-worn cast-iron skillet, and they will need these, but in the very back of the cupboard, shoved far against the wall, is an old, blackened rectangular baking tin. Rose pulls it out and hands it up to her mother.

  “No,” her mother says. “Not that one.”

  “You never use it,” Rose says. “It’s old.”

  “Not that one,” her mother says again. Her mother takes it from her, holding it against her chest. “It was my mother’s.”

  Rose’s grandmother died a long time ago, when her mother was very young. Her grandfather had died a month before her grandmother, both deaths from influenza.

  “It was on the counter by the sink the day she died,” her mother says. “She baked me a birthday cake. I thought that if my mother had baked a cake, she must be better, but I was wrong. She was dead in her bed, and I just didn’t know it.”

  Rose’s mother stands clutching the pan to her chest. Rose stays quiet, studying her mother’s face, intrigued by this woman who hardly ever shows how she feels, except behind closed doors. Also, Rose loves stories about great losses and great love.

  In a calm, indifferent tone, Rose’s mother tells her the story of the pan. “I was wearing my Sunday clothes, but they smelled musty. I’d dug them out of the bottom of the laundry basket. My father had just died. My mother was sick, but she refused to go to the hospital. She said they would never let her come home if she went. So I got dressed and went downstairs. The wood-stove was out. I didn’t know how to light it.

  “The pan was covered with a thin towel, and I peeked at it. It was a cake, my birthday cake. So everything must be fine, I thought, and I sat and waited for everything to be fine.

  “My aunt Rebecca came. She went upstairs and came back down a little later. My mother was dead, she said. I had to come home with her. She asked me if I had a doll I wanted to bring. She was trying to be kind. I said no, I wouldn’t go, but she took my hand and pulled me off the stool. I twisted out of her grip and grabbed the pan with the towel still on it. I took it with me to my aunt’s. I never went back in my house. My aunt wouldn’t let me eat the cake. Germs, she said. My mother’s germs.”

  Now Rose’s mother turns the pan over in her hand, feeling its weight. “A few bullets?” she says, in a strange dead voice that sends shivers up Rose’s spine. “A half a helmet? I suppose I should, but I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  Her mother looks down at her, and still holding the pan in one hand, brushes her fingers against Rose’s cheek. Rose is as
surprised by this as the story of the pan. Her mother’s fingertips are rough. She thought they would be soft. They were, once. “I’ll give you the pan, when you get married. You’ll take good care of it, won’t you, dear?”

  “Yes,” Rose says. She will, too. It’s just the kind of thing Rose knows she will be good at, and she is very touched her mother has assigned her this task.

  A few years after my father died, when I was fourteen, I made brownies in this pan that my grandmother gave my mother, and took them, in the pan, to the school bake sale. I never brought it back. When my mother found out that the pan was lost, she went nuts.

  “I should have known you’d lose it! I told you how important it was! It was my mother’s. My dead mother’s. Don’t you care about anything?” She slammed a cupboard door and kicked a wall, leaving a dent.

  I didn’t remember her telling me about the pan. If she did, it was long ago, when I was very little. How could she expect me to remember something for so long?

  I bought another baking tin for her birthday, the same size and shape, but new, to become old, handed down from mother to daughter until it was old again. She said, “It’s not the same thing.”

  I didn’t mean it to be the same thing. I meant it to hold the story of me saying that I was sorry for losing part of her past. When we packed up her stuff to move her here to Todd’s house, it was nowhere to be found.

  I told Todd the story of the first pan, when I couldn’t find the new one. He said, “You baked brownies in a pan that was over eighty-five years old?”

  “Yes, I did,” I said. He nodded, but his eyes were amused. We continued packing my mother’s things in silence. I was mad at him for days, until I needed him to take Jazz to the mall for me.

  Chapter Two

  My mother rolls over and her arm flops through the opening between the bed’s rails. I take her hand. Once, at the zoo with Jazz, we watched two chimpanzees reaching through their separate cages to hold hands. All day I wondered how long those chimps held hands. How long was long enough?

  Her eyes flutter and open. “Tiffany?” my mother says. Tiffany was one of the women we had come live with my mother, those years she began to lose her mind, those years I thought of, then, as more than I could bear.

  “No, Mother,” I say. “It’s me. Jenny. Your daughter.”

  She nods. “Oh, yes.” But I know this nod, this vague reply. She doesn’t know who I am, but she has good instincts and has been confused long enough to be wary. “Where’s Tiffany?” There’s fright in her voice. She’s on the edge of losing the reality she thinks she has.

  What’s the point? I wonder, giving up. “She’ll be back in a minute. Would you like some ginger ale? Are you hungry?” I prop her up with an extra pillow.

  She nods again.

  I knew she would be thirsty and have brought one up with me. I open the can, fill the plastic cup halfway, and stick in a straw, pretending I’m a soda jerk at an old-fashioned drugstore. It’s a game I’m getting good at, being anyone but me. Sometimes it’s easier this way. Sometimes I quite enjoy it.

  “Here you go, ma’am. Just as you like it.”

  “Thank you, miss,” she says with hesitation, as if a few words might betray her.

  I’m right. She’s forgotten me again. But being right doesn’t make me feel so special. It used to. I used to be so good at being right.

  “Are you hungry?” I repeat.

  “No. Just thirsty.”

  These times when she’s alert but not raging are when I want to ask her questions, prod her, get her mind working again, but if I ask the wrong questions, she’ll get confused and upset. The problem is, I never know what the wrong questions are.

  “Can I go home today?” she says.

  What can I say to that, that won’t upset her? I think about the advice people have given me. Don’t contradict a person with Alzheimer’s unless you absolutely have to; let them believe what they want. I could tell her she’ll be going home tomorrow, and tomorrow she won’t remember. I tried that before—we spent the day packing up her belongings, then I put them all back again at night while she slept.

  But Alzheimer’s patients are easily distracted. I reach under the bedside table for the photo albums. They’re old and thick, the covers in browns and reds, and I imagine the pictures tumbling out of them like fall leaves; pressed memories, whole vacations in a picture or two. I wonder if these pictures shrink our memory, until the entire trip to the amusement park is that wave from the carousel. What happened to the hours when no one took pictures?

  I grab a red album because it doesn’t look as familiar to me. I open it, and there are Simon and my mother at some party. I know my mistake immediately, but as I go to close the album, my mother says, “Let me see.”

  I could distract her again, but part of me says, Okay, let her see. I lean over the rails and place it in her lap. The light in the room comes from an overhead globe, designed to cut the glare so there’s nothing to hamper the vision of what she sees but her own mind. “Who is this man?” she asks.

  “That’s Simon,” I say. I don’t want to explain that this is a man she dated after my father died. I’m not ready for my father to die. I’m going slowly through her life so I don’t get there too fast. I distract us both. “Do you want me to brush your hair?”

  “Yes.”

  I close the album. “Let me get you turned around.” This takes some time. I have to put down the rails, fold back the blankets, move her legs to the side and over the bed. I get the brush and climb up. Brace her against my legs so she leans slightly backward, not forward. Brushing her hair, I clock off five minutes, just as I did when my daughter was two: a plastic book in her high chair after lunch could keep her happy for five minutes while I did the dishes. Ten minutes with a pot and a wooden spoon. Five minutes to change her diapers and clean her bottom. These minutes added up so slowly, but they eventually got me there; to her nap time, a time I always found emptier than I expected.

  My mother’s hair is not the thin of old age, and I think while I brush the almost grayless brown curls that maybe this is what she sees when she looks in the mirror, just the hair of her youth.

  Jazz walks in the room. “I need twenty dollars,” she says.

  I concentrate on brushing my mother’s hair, try to relax my arm. This is nothing uncommon, this request for twenty dollars, but I always want to get upset. I want my daughter to think she’s asking for too much. When did five dollars become ten, ten become twenty? When did I stop being sure what she spends her money on? “What for?” I say. And then, under my breath, as if my mother can’t hear me, “Say hello.”

  “Hi, Nana,” she says, with just a quick look and a nod. “I’m going to a movie.”

  “Movies cost twenty dollars?” I don’t know why I say this. I already know she’ll find some claim to my twenty.

  “Aurora, Turtle, and I are going to Mongolian Barbeque for dinner.”

  “I’m making dinner.”

  She rolls her eyes like I’m crazy. “It’s Saturday.”

  I know what she means. I never make dinner on Saturday. Saturday is my day off. Sometimes Fridays, too. I welcome any excuse not to cook. I have cooked dinners since I was twelve. “But I am making dinner tonight, and I expect you here.”

  “What are you making?”

  Once again, I know what she means, and it’s satisfying that I know her this well. She’s testing me. There’s no food in the fridge for dinner. She’s calling my bluff.

  “Fettuccine with clam sauce and garlic bread.” Garlic bread’s a stretch since there is no French bread, but a little garlic butter on white bread, then toasted, will do. But this is only a game, this answer.

  “Well, I made plans. Aurora’s mom’s already on the way here, and Turtle’s dad’s picking us up after the movie because I knew you wouldn’t drive, so I took care of all that. So don’t blame me ’cause you decided to cook dinner on a Saturday for the first time in a hundred years.”

  “Don�
��t talk to the help like that!” my mother spits out. “How dare you! You apologize to Tiffany right now, Jennifer, then go to your room!”

  Jazz and I are stunned into silence. How could my mother make this mistake? This girl standing here, this downright beauty, this near woman who astounds me every day with the fact that she came from me; how can my mother think Jazz is me?

  Jazz rolls her eyes. “I need twenty dollars. I’m being picked up in two minutes. I’ll pay you back if I have to with my birthday money.” On the turn of a dime, her face changes. She smiles. She bats her long mascara-covered eyelashes. She pouts her purple-colored lips. “Please, Mommy?”

  I nod, and she turns to leave with a skip, turns back with a smile. “Thanks.” She knows this much, to thank me. She’s no dope. She’s just rude and spoiled, and I love her too much. I am still brushing my mother’s hair. My arm aches.

  “She shouldn’t talk to you like that,” my mother says. “She can be very rude. I just don’t understand her at all.”

  For the first time in days she can fully express herself, and I want to run screaming from the room. My mother never understood me. I want to grab her shoulders and shake her. I want to say, come back to me and I will tell you why. I imagine her brain like a friendly prison guard. Don’t go there, it says. You’ll get hurt.

  I fix her hair, get her into the chair, turn on the TV, and tell her I’ll be back.

  That woman and the rude child are gone. Rose thought the rude child was her daughter, but now she’s not so sure.

  That was her life, that story the woman told, and it was a little too close for comfort. The woman couldn’t have known about her listening to her parents talking in their bedroom that night, her fear that her mother was having an affair. Rose doesn’t like it, that these things are being said about her, even to her.

  And the stuff about the ducks was plain dumb. She never named ducks. But before she can work up any real steam, any real anger, she becomes unsure what the woman said, and what she didn’t; what Rose listened to, and what she really heard.