by Sarah Willis
Still, at the funeral she felt more alive than ever before. Everything was so bright, so clear. Just brushing a hand against her cheek she felt shivers ripple right through her whole body. Her tears for Jimmy Miller were warm and comforting, and so salty. Had she ever tasted her tears before? Rose was surprised by the thought that feeling alive had nothing to do with happiness.
There are good times, too. She and her friends go to movies every Friday and Saturday night. Musicals with film reels about the war that make her heart pound. There’s so little gasoline to go anywhere that boys siphon gas tanks in the dark, and sometimes everyone has to get out of the car and push it up a hill. Rose and her best friend Penelope swear on her father’s stacks of Bibles that they will sign up as WAACs as soon as they graduate. They write to Rose’s brothers, and soldiers they have never met, on the thin, blue airmail paper. The letters they get back have whole pieces cut out, and she and Penelope fill in the mystery words with the images of film-reel war. Sometimes they forget the war altogether and paint their toenails red on Sunday nights, listening to Fibber McGee and Molly and giggling like little kids. “It ain’t funny, McGee!” they shout while elbowing each other in the ribs. Penelope says, “Gosh darn it,” when she gets mad, and Rose says, “Hell’s bells!” On Mondays they go back to school, where there are announcements on the loudspeaker. A boy’s name, a moment of silence.
Her father is gone for long periods of time, and her mother cleans the house day and night. Dust under a chair sends her into a fit. She cleans the corners and the toilet and the stove with toothbrushes that she soaks in cups filled with Clorox bleach. The air is so sharp in Rose’s throat that she drinks tea three and four times a day. Penelope asks her if there’s something wrong with her mother, and Rose gets so mad she doesn’t speak to Penelope for days.
Sometimes her mother calls her by her sister Celia’s name, not correcting herself. Rose’s brothers are at the war, and her sisters have all moved out of town. She imagines their lives as brave, and interesting, and a bit messy.
One morning in late April, Rose walks to school and looks up at the sky. The trees have buds on the tips of each branch, and they remind her of the tightly rolled horoscopes that sit on the counter at the corner drugstore. She jumps, trying to touch the curled leaves, even though she knows she can’t jump high enough. A leap of faith, she tells herself, pleased with the thought. Her smile fades as she realizes that school will end soon; she needs to find something to do this summer or she will go mad. She could get a job at the drugstore, or the dry cleaners, but she wants something more, something daring.
That day the assistant principal calls Rose into his office. He introduces her to a new student, an odd-looking girl with deep-set eyes and a white cane. Beatrice is blind and will need someone to escort her through the halls to her classes. Rose has been selected. She’s proud at being asked, as if she’s been drafted for something brave. At first she’s nervous being near this strange, blind girl. Rose describes everything to Beatrice: the gray color of the walls, the windows above the classroom doors, the water fountain. Beatrice feels the metallic silver case of the water fountain with her fingertips, presses the button, touches the water, then finally takes a sip. Suddenly Rose sees the water fountain as a strange and beautiful thing. She knows she will have to touch the water herself, when no one’s looking.
Beatrice is not afraid to talk about herself, a fact that surprises Rose. She tells Rose about Parma, the town she moved from, and about her family. None of her brothers or sisters are blind, a fact that somehow relieves Rose. As they walk from class to class, Beatrice tells Rose all about a summer camp for the blind, where they have arts and crafts, and swim, and follow ropes around to get from building to building. It is only an hour from Cleveland, in Geneva, Ohio. She says the camp counselors are the greatest.
On the way home from school, Rose notices that the buds on the trees have opened. Above Rose’s head are thousands of glossy, light green leaves. She says “Amen,” as if this new growth is a prayer that has bloomed right out here in the open sky.
At home she gives her mother a hug and tells her about her plan to be gone for the summer, volunteering at a camp for the blind. “You’re a sweet girl, Celia,” her mother says. “I’ll miss you. Will you come back next year?”
“Yes, Mother,” Rose says.
“Well, that’s nice.” She brushes her hands on her starched white apron and looks around for something to do. Rose’s chest flutters like a bird in a cage that will soon be opened. She’s worried about her mother, but she doesn’t know what to do. She goes upstairs and pulls her suitcase out from under the bed, where she has stored it like a girl placing a slice of wedding cake wrapped in a napkin under a pillow hoping to see the face of the man she will marry; Rose has slept above her suitcase with the dream of leaving home.
That summer Rose learns to guide the blind, memorizes the braille alphabet, and spends her days with people who can’t see her. They put on plays and do pottery, they row boats and go on hikes. She spends one day with a blindfold over her eyes, inching forward, her hands out like the antenna of ants. She learns she can laugh and make jokes with people who at first seemed so sad and pitiful. She writes letters home like the airmail letters she received from soldiers, leaving out whole pieces of her life; when she tries to write the words that might explain how she feels, they seem less than what she meant, and she crosses them out so no one can see even the curve of a false word. She’s writes the facts, lists the activities, as if her day were a simple series of scheduled events instead of a headlong tumble through mistakes and small successes.
When she goes back home at the end of the summer, she thinks she is a different person. Her mother is still the same. Her father is not around.
Near the end of twelfth grade, President Roosevelt dies. Rose is terribly upset; it’s more than just losing a beloved president—she has lost a man who has, in her fantasies, replaced her father. Rose is not one for silly fantasies; this is the only one she has. Her father’s away so much, he could be just about anyone. Rose’s mother cries for days after Roosevelt’s death, but she still cleans. Sometimes she twitches when her husband is mentioned. Rose is the editor of The Black and Gold, the star swimmer on the swim team, and the first female president of the student council. She thinks her father would be very proud of her.
She goes to church and prays, but sometimes it doesn’t make her feel better. Sometimes she wonders if God cares much about her at all. What an awful thought. It is she who has to care about God. What is the matter with her?
Before Mass is even over, my mother is crying. Thin streams of tears streak her cheeks. I don’t know what the priest might have said that brought this on. I take her arm and lead her out of church. When I ask her what’s wrong, she doesn’t answer.
Jazz is still sleeping when we get home. Todd’s still gone. Upstairs, I help my mother get out of her Sunday clothes and into sweatpants and a sweatshirt. She hates sweatshirts and sweatpants. The only way I can convince her to wear them is to buy the kind that look fancy; white with gold lamé designs and rhinestones. I need her to wear something easy to get in and out of, no buttons or zippers or tie strings.
I ask her if she would like to sit downstairs in the living room with me and have some coffee. She nods. She hasn’t said a word since we entered the church.
I carry out two cups of coffee, placing one on the table by her chair, a table I inherited when I sold her house. There wasn’t much furniture left since she sold it off piece by piece to support her “traveling bug,” as she called it. The years before her Alzheimer’s developed, she rented out her house and roamed the country, staying in rooming houses or with old friends, and living with both Betsy or Peter for a month now and then. When in Cleveland, she stayed with me for a few days, just enough time to sell some furniture.
All that was left besides a few odds and ends was this table, a bookcase with glass doors, and my grandfather’s rolltop desk, which Betsy and Pete
r said I could keep. Well, sure, I thought. It weighs a ton.
“I want . . .” my mother says. She doesn’t know the words for what she wants; I don’t know what I want.
“Sugar in your coffee? I already put in two teaspoons.” I should let her watch me put it in so she’ll believe me, but I never do. She takes the first sip with puckered doubt. I told Todd that my mother trusts me now. It was a lie.
“Did you like church?” I ask. Did you ever love me? I want to say.
“No,” she says, and I take in a breath and hold it, then remember what I really asked her.
“Why?”
“Because!” she says, as if my tone had been accusatory. I drink my coffee. She drinks hers. We glance at each other across the few feet that separate us. Wary. That’s the word that comes to me. As she loses her words, I have begun to collect my own. A bunker of words. The more words I learn now the more I will have when, and if, I begin to lose my own.
All my grand and noble plans to reconstruct my mother are built on the hope that someone will do the same for me. Not someone. Jazz. And when it comes time for her to tell the story of me, I want her to remember I took my mother in.
“What did you do after high school?” I ask.
“I worked as a . . .” Her eyes go hazy, and I am about to supply the word secretary, because, of course, I know, but then her eyes light up and she smiles like a kid getting the right answer. “Typist! I worked . . . where those men worked.”
“A law firm?” I ask.
She nods briskly. “Yes, yes.”
And this I never understood; why go from wanting so much, being the first female president of the student council, to being a secretary? But it’s a question I haven’t probed too deeply, because it can turn around and bite me. I worked for eight years in a Free Clinic, and now I work at a hospital. The ideals of free health care went out the window when I had to support my daughter.
“Why?” I ask now. “Why a typist?”
“For the . . .” She rubs her fingers together. I see the word money. “I needed the . . .” and she does the motion with her fingers again.
I say, “Money?”
She nods theatrically, like I’m stupid. “Yes, the . . . the money. It doesn’t grow on . . .” With the back of her hand she waves to the window. Trees, I say to myself, then repeat it in my head, forcing an image of a tree, connecting those synapses one more time but not really believing I could ever forget the word tree.
“Why didn’t you go to college?”
“He wouldn’t pay.”
“Who?” I ask.
“My father.”
“Why?”
“It was a waste of a girl’s time.” She’s gaining her words back. Sometimes she’s like a car, you just have to get her jump-started.
“Why a waste?”
She looks at me quizzically. “Who are you?”
She’s trying to distract me. This works two ways. “Did you forgive him?”
“Did I forgive who?”
“Your father. Did you forgive him for not sending you to college?”
She snorts. “I did just fine. I was a typist. Did I tell you I was a typist at that place? I was very good. I typed eighty things a minute. I made good . . .” She rubs her fingers together without a hitch in her sentence. “I got lifted up twice in the first year. The others were jealous of me.” She pauses, and I wait. “Of course I forgave my father.” But then she sags, as if every muscle has lost its strength. “I should have gone to . . .” She makes the shape of a box.
I supply the word. “College.”
She nods. “I wanted to be a . . .”
I wait, not knowing what she wanted to be.
She puckers her lips together, mad. Closes her eyes. About ten seconds later she shouts, “Journalist!” The effort seems to exhaust her and she starts to cry. I wince and think, shit. Still, I’m glad to have found this out, this thing she wanted to be. Her crying gets louder, and I hand her a tissue. Time for distraction.
“Did you ever have a cat?”
She pauses. I imagine neurons trying to find the word cat, the textile sense of fur, the sound of a purr, the warmth in her lap. It takes a while, but then she nods. “Lovely.” She raises a hand as if she is going to stroke something. “Lovely.”
That’s what she named it. At thirteen I had to go outside at night and holler, “Here, Lovely. Here, Lovely, Lovely.” My mother was always the one to name our cats. Peter, Betsy, and I had no choice in the matter. When I was twenty, I got two cats and named them Pine Cone and Buttons, because when I was twelve I promised myself that someday I’d get a cat and name it either Pine Cone or Buttons, and of course, true to myself, I had to take it one step further. Get two cats. I never loved them as much as I should have because I named them out of spite.
I may have named Jazz out of spite, too, but I love her.
But Lovely’s not the cat I was thinking about. “What about that other cat, wasn’t it called Tulip?” I can’t help testing her, testing this Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t called Tulip.
My mother looks at me. She’s suddenly young, smiling. A giggle on her face. “No, silly. Daisy. It was Daisy. My first cat was Daisy. White, with a yellow spot. Right here.” She points to her forehead. “A white cat with a yellow spot.” She taps her forehead again.
“What happened to Daisy?” I ask.
“Oh, she’s dead,” my mother says with a flick of her hand.
I look at her closely. This is my mother. This is exactly what she would say to me, just to show me that I hadn’t gotten to her, to show she was tougher than me by far. All our troubles stem from the fact that neither one of us could give in first.
“How long ago did she die?” I ask.
That gets her. She blinks and looks around the room. A worried look crosses her face. Then she squints at me. “Who the hell are you?” she says.
Both my parents have asked me that. Neither of them meant it in a philosophical sort of way.
“You know, Mrs. Morgan,” I say, “I heard you were quite the femme fatale when you worked in that law firm.”
She straightens up in her chair as much as she can. The curve of her spine holds her in the slight shape of a question mark. That will be my spine someday. I sit up straighter, too. We look like two women with sticks up our butts.
“I dated my fair share of . . .” She doesn’t even try to make the shape of men with her hands. “Nothing wrong with that.”
“You broke their hearts,” I say, nicely, as if that’s what’s expected; to be beautiful and break men’s hearts.
“I suppose,” she says. “They got over it.”
After graduating high school, Rose volunteers at the camp for the blind again, but it’s only a summer job. She needs a real job, since her father won’t pay for college. There seems to be very little money for the amount of time he works. The thought that he might have another life somewhere crosses Rose’s mind like a plane across the sky. She would have to peer too closely to be sure of the shape of her father’s deceit. She can’t and doesn’t want to. The thought that her father might be keeping another woman is a vapor trail, it disassembles; she can’t touch it.
Rose gets a job as a secretary in a law firm in downtown Cleveland. She and her mother pass by each other going into and out of the kitchen. They say “Good morning,” and “Good night,” and “How are you?” Neither wants an honest answer.
One day Rose finds a white kitten with a yellow spot on its forehead meowing pitifully in a parking lot outside her office building. A kitten in downtown Cleveland won’t last an hour, so Rose picks it up and brings it home. Her mother gets hysterical.
“You must take that thing out of here at once!”
“But it’s a kitten. It’s been abandoned.”
“Out! Out! Out!” Her mother stamps her feet like a child, pointing to the front door as if Rose doesn’t know where it might be. “It will have fleas! Get it out of here right now!” Then, frightening to Rose, her mot
her bursts into tears and pleads. “Please. Please get rid of it.” Her eyes are hollow and huge. Stunned, Rose nods.
Rose walks out of the house holding the kitten, and takes a bus to her friend Ginny Hartman’s apartment, where she lives with two roommates.
“I have to stay with you until I find a place of my own,” Rose says, skipping any greetings, losing, for once, her inbred politeness.
“Huh?”
“I found this kitten and my mother won’t let me bring her in the house.”
Ginny takes one look at the kitten and says, “Oh. All right. Come on in.” The next day Rose buys a cot from the Salvation Army and sets it up in the living room. Leaving the kitten at the apartment, she goes home to pack up.
“You’re moving out?” her mother asks. She hasn’t asked where Rose was last night. She hasn’t used Rose’s name. Her mother is fifty-eight, and something more than senile. Rose has seen her talking to the furniture, the plants, the dishes. She drives to the market and the hairdresser’s, but she doesn’t go anywhere else. Some days she seems perfectly normal. Three out of four days her mother is just fine, Rose tells herself as she packs.
“It’s time,” Rose says. There are two suitcases at her feet. She holds a stuffed tiger under an arm, trying to decide if she can carry all this and an umbrella. It’s not raining, but it might, someday.
“Well, good luck,” her mother says. Rose leans over and kisses her mother on the cheek and walks out the door.
She holds her head up as she carries the two suitcases, the stuffed animal, and the umbrella to the bus stop. She could have waited until later, asked a friend with a car for a ride, but she didn’t. She’s nineteen and can certainly take care of herself.
Rose doesn’t have to sleep on the cot for more than a week before one of the roommates announces she’s pregnant and going to live with an aunt. Rose is appalled at the girl’s stupidity but wishes her luck—then gets her bedroom. She turns the mattress over and buys new sheets.
