Misty knew it. She was the one who told me about the letters zipped up in her mother’s purse, letters that proved that Mo and Gene Files had had something going on before the Rhodeses even moved from Ferris Beach. They were friends, I had offered, a part of me also wanting to believe the best, but she shook her head back and forth. “I read them,” she whispered. “My dad has no idea that I snuck them and read them.” She closed her eyes, jerked her head and shoulders as if to shake the thought away. I waited for her to tell me what she had read but she didn’t. “Dad burned them,” she said.
That night she told me how she had prayed that her mother would come home and stay home. “And look at how it was answered,” she sobbed. “She’s home for good, isn’t she?” I felt her fingers wrap around my arm, nails squeezing into me as she lay there shaking, breath shallow.
Misty was determined to take the blame, to absorb it all like a sponge. More than ever she wanted to watch the old movies; she seemed to take comfort in the ones where it was the child who had left the mother. During Madame X she kept saying over and over again how the mother-in-law made Lana Turner leave her family, and wasn’t it so horrible that she couldn’t get a message through, wouldn’t it be so wonderful if somewhere there was a message. Yes, yes, I was thinking, wanting so much to tell Misty how I was searching for my own message, how I was sure that I had seen Angela that very day, but the time had passed for that. My own speculations were trite in comparison.
I knew Misty had turned their split-level upside down looking for her answer, and still had found nothing. She seemed desperate in those months to follow, looking, searching. One day I saw her from my upstairs window just standing in her carport. She was wearing one of Mo’s loud scarves around her waist, holding a coffee cup in her hand, with Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” turned up full blast as she collected the little pebbles that had rolled onto the driveway, tossing them one by one out into the yard. I still couldn’t shake the image of her as she was that day, after Mo left home, screaming for her mother again and again, arms outstretched to the black swirling clouds.
Soon, enough time passed that she stopped spending her days around the house, and we were able to get back to normal. We talked about the approaching first day of ninth grade and what we were going to wear; I talked about my fears of algebra and having to dress out in one of those gray gym suits, and she talked about what boys she liked and what songs were her favorites. Misty had discovered the notion of predestination, the belief that her mother’s life had no other course than the one taken, and she was clinging to it. I nodded in agreement. “It’s possible,” I said, offering her the same hope she had always offered me, though I could not stop thinking about her prayer, the prayer that her mother would come home and stay forever. I could not stop thinking about all the prayers, flying upwards, crisscrossing like the airwaves, one request put on hold while another is answered.
Eleven
Misty was subject to blimp jokes every year on the first day of school when she had to announce in her little self-introduction that her father worked at Goodyear. On the first day of ninth grade there was a whole new audience for these jokes, since our school system had enlarged to include a whole new population of kids from the county. Now our system was fully integrated and until the new school buildings were completed, we would all cram into the musty, creaking halls of Samuel T. Saxon. Misty and I were relieved on the first day to find that we had the same homeroom teacher; we had feared that they would divide us up alphabetically, which would have placed us at opposite ends of the school.
“Blimp,” a boy in the back row murmured, and Misty paused, sucked in her cheeks as she stared at him a long hard second before continuing. He was a complete stranger to us. “And my mother is dead,” she said, and turned to the teacher, smiled. “She died this summer in a car crash where she was thrown thirty feet from the car. My baby brother, Buddy, was with her and he also died. He was named after the late great Buddy Holly because my mother believed in naming after the dead, particularly the young dead. My mother never knew what hit her, they say. They say she was hit with the impact of a couple of tons.”
Misty continued staring at the back of the room, though the boy who had uttered “Blimp” had his eyes cast downward on his desk. I didn’t want to watch her either; it was too painful to see her there in a purple T-shirt that had belonged to her mother, the arm bands cutting into her skin. My desk was angled such that I could see into the hall, and I stared out there, at pencil scribbles on the cracked plaster and at the old water fountain where I knew someone had stuck a wad of bright green gum at the place the water should come out. I had given up on school water fountains by that time; if it wasn’t a wad of gum, then it was the chance that someone would creep up behind and push your head down into the spout. R.W. Quincy had done that to a girl and chipped her front tooth the year before.
I could see into the classroom across the hall, where a sign on the door read “Davis Homeroom,” and I could see Merle Hucks, or half of the back of his head, could see his wispy white hair as he sat crouched over a piece of notebook paper, a ball-point pen gripped firmly in the visible hand, the left one. His left foot was turned to reveal the worn sole of a Converse hightop and what looked like brown dress socks as he swung his knee back and forth.
“Thank you, Misty,” the teacher said. “That’s fine.”
“I have her scarf at home,” Misty said. “It still has slivers of glass in it.”
“Let’s see who’s next.” Miss Mclntyre, a very young black woman perhaps teaching for the first time, ran her finger down the roster, probably afraid to give another student the floor as she had given Misty. Merle turned to say something to the girl across from him and, in turning back, looked over his shoulder and out into the hall as if he felt my stare. I knew he saw me looking; I knew there was that moment just before I looked down when he saw me and I was thinking about all of this, my face flaming red, when Miss Mclntyre called my name, my hand flying instinctively to my cheek as I prepared to stand.
“Come on, Kitty,” Misty said, and whirled to look at the back of the room. “Only her good, good friends call her Kitty. Others call her Kate. Only people who have shared things like death with her can call her Kitty.” Misty, regardless of her motivation, if there was one aside from bitterness and the need to attract attention, had given me enough time to breathe steadily, time for my face to be less warm, my knees less rubbery before standing. I stared at Miss Mclntyre while I spoke, ignoring her smile and her gesture for me to move my hand so that I didn’t cover my mouth. I gave my name and told how my father taught math at the community college and how my mother had once taught high school history, American history, but now was a housewife; I said it all as quickly as I could, and when I sat back in my desk I would have sworn that Merle Hucks had heard it all, that he was looking out the door right up until the moment the teacher of his homeroom walked over and closed it, leaving only a chart of the periodic table, taped to the door, for me to see.
The story of Mo’s death seemed to surface time and time again that fall, each time taking on new shapes and new explanations. Probably the most curious person about it all was Sally Jean Holmes, who had suddenly appeared and become a fixture in the Rhodeses’ life. She was a thin, freckled woman who had met Mr. Rhodes only a month after Mo’s death, when she went into Goodyear to get a new set of radials for her Rambler. She later told my mother it was when he said, “Your tires’ll be worth more than your car,” that she recognized something in him not often found in a man—honesty. They had just been dating a month when Mr. Rhodes got his hair permed and began dressing in what Misty called “Brady Bunch” fashion, leisure suits and such.
They had only dated four months when Mr. Rhodes got Misty and Dean all dressed up and in the car with him with the story that they were going to a relative’s wedding. Misty came home furious and spoke only to me for several weeks after that. “My dad must have been hard up horny to marry such a drip,” she said time
and time again. “Next to my mother, she’s ugly, REAL UGLY. And she’s making our house just as ugly with her little cross-stitched signs that tell you how to do everything. She was going to give away my mother’s things.” Misty’s mouth was set stubbornly, her face the thinnest it had ever been and she hadn’t even been trying. “Imagine that. Just who died and left her queen?” Her eyes watered with the mistake of her own words, but instead of crying, she laughed and draped her arm around my shoulder. “She’s not throwing away one stick of my mother’s things. Not one damn stick.” Then Misty pulled me inside, where she tiptoed around and showed me all of the little needle-crafted signs hung about.
It was true that Sally Jean did have a thing about cross-stitching little sayings, and this is what she did most of the time when she was not at the hospital where she worked as a nurse in the geriatric unit. Proverbs, that’s what she had in common with my mother; but even my mother, who loved proverbs, found Sally Jean’s to be a bit much, particularly the one Sally Jean framed and hung in their little guest bathroom which said, “We aim to please. You aim, too, please.” She had already finished one for my mother that said “A Recipe For Friendship” and then had all sorts of things like “a dash of kindness” or “a sprinkle of tenderness.”
“Friendship,” Mrs. Poole had said, and flipped the picture over to examine Sally Jean’s needlework from the back, where neatness counts. There was something kind of sad in all of that to me, like maybe Sally Jean was trying too hard, though I never would have voiced this bit of sympathy to Misty, who was doing everything she could to make the woman miserable.
My mother was friendly to Sally Jean, though I could tell it wasn’t always easy. Sally had once seen Liberace in an airport, and she used this as a way to mark all of the events of her life. “Well, now, let’s see, that was before I saw Liberace” or “That was just about the time I saw Liberace.” I had already heard what he was wearing twice, so I was sure my mother had heard it at least five beyond that. Sally Jean was a nervous talker, just could not stop for two seconds. Sometimes her narrow, birdlike face turned pink before she could suck in a breath. “I like to have died when I saw him there, you can imagine, now can’t you? Can’t you just imagine?” She pushed my mother’s arm for a response. “Sequins. I’ve never seen the likes of so many sequins, and I thought to myself how long did it take to sew them all? He made Elvis look plain, that’s how flashy it was to see Liberace. It was dazzling. It was absolutely extraneous” Those were the times my mother bit her lips the hardest; Sally Jean’s dictionary was nothing like anyone else’s.
“Really.”
“Yes. The whole airport went akimbo with excitement.”
My mother was too kind to just come right out and correct her, but Theresa Poole was not. One day when the three of them were sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and Sally Jean had already referred at least twice to seeing Liberace in the airport, she hung her head and laughed, clicked her tongue several times to create suspense. It was clear from my mother’s and Mrs. Poole’s expressions that she did not have them hanging on the edge of a cliff, but she didn’t even notice. “Here’s an antidote for you.”
“What, have I been poisoned?” Mrs. Poole asked, and looked at my mother. “I said, have I been poisoned that I need an antidote?” She laughed but my mother was staring at the salt shaker, pretending she had not noticed the error. “I said...”
“I heard you,” Sally Jean said, and leaned forward. “But just wait until I tell you mine and then we’ll hear all about yours.” That’s when my mother laughed and then Sally Jean, pleased to have the floor, continued.
Sally had lived her whole life in Flat Pine, which is a small town right between Fulton and Ferris Beach; she continued living there even after her first husband had left her for their next door neighbor. It was when this story broke the surface that I was able to begin to understand what had drawn her and Mr. Rhodes together; they had both been left behind.
“She never even returned my meat thermometer that she had borrowed,” Sally Jean told my mother, shaking her head sadly as if that thermometer carried the same weight as a husband. My mother, equally big on little proverbs, often said, oh, what a tangled web we weave, a little lie will lead to a big one; a child who cheats in school will grow up to steal. Right then I imagined her saying, A woman who will borrow your meat thermometer and not return it will grow up to borrow your husband and not return him. I often looked at Sally Jean, which is what I called her since the title “Mrs. Rhodes” did not in any way fit her gangly, speckled ways, and wondered if she and Mr. Rhodes talked about their losses, spoke about how they were both losers, their love lost to another. I also couldn’t help but wonder where Sally Jean would one day be buried, on the other side of Mr. Rhodes or back in Flat Pine all alone, the way she had spent much of her life? Cemeteries for Swinging Singles. It seemed to be the only singles institution not yet conceived of.
My mother described Mo’s leaving to Sally Jean many times upon request, each time softening it all. I could not understand WHY Sally asked for it over and over, unless it was like the way Misty and I might watch Shenandoah or Imitation of Life or Stella Dallas to get a good cry, to somehow purify all that was unspoken inside us. Or maybe it was like pressing on a bruised patch of skin or hammering a tight sore muscle to see if it still hurt, as if applying pain to pain can somehow cancel out or negate the first. Sally had to hear it often, like a shot of medicine, to rid herself of the memories that probably filled that split-level, in spite of the fact that the house had been completely redone in Early American furnishings with embroidered samplers, wall-to-wall carpet in a tasteful avocado, and all accessories falling into the FALL category: upholstery fabric in rust and avocado; eagles, flags and liberty bells on the kitchen wallpaper; appliances in avocado; new linoleum in avocado; counter tops in avocado.
“I’ll die if she says ‘avocado’ one more time,” Misty told me, and led me into her room, where she had all of the previous adornments, Japanese fans and little lanterns, ginger jars in loud orange-and-navy swirls, like a shrine. Within a month of marriage, Sally had the pebbles removed from the yard, and she planted grass; she planted mums in fall colors for the fall and jonquils and daylilies for fall colors in the spring and summer. She painted the peacock-blue shutters a deep forest green. “Thank God,” my mother and Mrs. Poole and everyone in the garden club said.
“I wish there were no fall colors,” Misty told me, as she stood in driveway wearing the purple kimono Mo had worn throughout her pregnancy. Misty had by then taken to wearing only red and purple and chartreuse, sometimes all together; sometimes when she raised her arms or moved hurriedly, I would catch a brief scent of Mo, her cologne, the sachets she kept in her drawers.
To look at Sally Jean, you would not have thought she’d have the nerve to cross Misty and make all those changes around the house. It seemed she would not want to hear that story over and over again, that she would not want to hear the words, the lovely the beautiful the vibrant, that always seeped into a description of Mo Rhodes, especially when it was turned over to Mrs. Poole and her cronies, who seemed to enjoy talking about Mo just to see Sally’s reaction.
It was almost as if Sally were waiting, hoping that one time the story would be told and there, rusty and open, would be the weak link, the reason to believe that Thomas Rhodes had not really loved Mo, much like when Laurence Olivier tells Joan Fontaine that he never loved the beautiful Rebecca, no, he despised her. But Sally’s wait was a futile one unless she could in her own way concoct some belief.
“She left them with no warning,” my mother said. “It was Fourth of July and we were all at the picnic. Why, Misty was right there with us as usual.”
“I guess she didn’t have much time for Misty,” Sally said, a half-hearted question, as she rubbed her finger along the checked pattern of the placemat.
“Oh, no, the girls were just always back and forth from house to house, always together, I mean like they are ...” My mothe
r’s voice trailed off, her “now” to end the sentence a low murmur as if she realized the truth, that though Misty and I were still always together, it was rarely over at their house.
“Oh, yes,” Sally said, and nodded her head, the skin of her face as white as the nurse’s dress she wore. “They are inseparable, aren’t they?”
“Anyway, Thomas went looking for her. Misty stayed here with us until he got home late that night, but they didn’t hear from her at all until the following day. I think she left a note that she’d be in touch, but nothing else.”
“That would’ve been the fifth of July that she called,” Sally said. It was as if she were etching it into stone. I imagined her sitting some evening when she was all alone with a calendar on her lap as she wrote out the timetable: 6:00 P.M.-people gather for the picnic. 8:30 P.M.-the fireworks begin.
“Yes, they always have a big sale down at Goodyear Tire, much like they do everywhere, but Thomas didn’t go in that day. I remember because I kept expecting to hear his car crank.”
“Yes, they still do have that sale,” Sally whispered.
“Anyway, Mo left the picnic with the baby.” Just the sound of her name, on my mother’s tongue, in Sally’s ear, seemed to conjure an image that left both of them quieter. “She didn’t stop by home or anything. Didn’t talk to Misty or Dean.”
“And she left with him”
“Yes.” Mama stood and went to the stove. “More coffee, Sally?”
“No, I don’t want my hands to be shaky at work.” She laughed, her voice already shaky. “It’s not good to be giving a shot or drawing blood with a shaky hand.”
“No, I’d think not.” Mama poured herself another cup and sat down again.
“It was so terrible for her to leave them that way,” Sally said, her cheeks flushed. “She must have been an awful person.” It was clear then that that was what she needed to hear, she was awful, but my mother, whether intentional or not, never gave a person exactly what he or she wanted, she always held out just a little, enough to get a beg, or maybe just enough to maintain control over a situation, or maybe it just never occurred to her.
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