“Stop it,” I say. “Please stop this now,” I say.
“Mothers are no good. Mothers are no good,” Cynthia repeats.
Her expression terrifies me, as if she has gone somewhere else and left me alone. I am so quiet I barely hear myself. It is more exhalation than protest, and Cynthia seems not to notice, though she sits back down and begins rocking again, only vaguely aware, it seems, of the girl gone slack at her feet.
“Oh, but I woke to the sun!” She smiles and lays her head back against the chair. “There is something wholly rectifying about a Midwestern sun, even in winter. Mother was laughing, laughing, and someone said, ‘Oh, Judy!’ and it occurred to me then, as I lay in bed, that she had been up for hours. Her hair done, her makeup carefully lined and brushed and blotted. There was lemonade in a pitcher and fresh fruit in a dish. Two decks of red and blue cards were certainly on the dining room table, shuffled many times. And she had already worried over that lovely porcelain boy, absent from his spot on the shelf.”
I AM BEQUEATHED an oversized diamond ring, a stuffed bear dressed in infant’s cotton pajamas, and a box of new and used toiletries, including forty-four individually wrapped bars of Dove soap. All of her surviving grandchildren were with her in her final days, though she wasn’t aware of it and wouldn’t have wanted to be. What she had wanted, I am sure, was to be left alone.
A bedside radio played opera. She breathed mechanically, as if intubated, but she was not. When the last visitors left, I sat and held her hand and watched her body slowly die. Nurses came and went, changing her diaper and moving the window shades up and down and coating her face in sweet-smelling lotion. I read stories aloud and tried to think of things to say, but there was nothing really after all, except I love you I love you I love you. I wore one of the turtleneck sweaters she’d bought for me and a pair of wool slacks. A brownnoser outfit, my mother would call it, and it was. I was frightened by how quickly her skin turned yellow and I dabbed furiously at the white foam that bubbled over her bottom lip and down her chin.
“What is that?” I demanded of the nurses, and they answered patiently and gave me a pile of clean rags with which to wipe her down.
Her tongue hung thick over her white teeth like a hooked fish. She breathed one-two, one-two. I filed her nails.
Then the nurse pressed her neck with two fingers and nodded and brushed back her curly hair.
That night I dreamed of cool black well water, of mothers like cake, of splitting seeds and the divested bone, of living boys with tender mouths and kisses on the cheek, of perfect Parisian dolls in perfect time, of silence and willful creatures, of flying full-faced toward a Midwestern sun.
She comes to her funeral in a tiny box and her accountant, Emory, a kind man resembling Abraham Lincoln, tells funny stories by her grave. It is next to my father’s grave and Uncle Eric’s, which is more weathered. Uncle David is buried next to his infant daughter two towns over. My brother Eric, newly sober and handsome beneath a sable sky, holds my hand tightly. The beautiful Jamaican housekeeper, Icy, shows up after having been unceremoniously fired twenty years before. She weeps openly and with her whole body. I think that such a physical display of emotion would have unnerved Cynthia, that she would have tittered, or maybe that isn’t right at all.
“That woman saved my life,” Icy sobs again and again.
We believe that Cynthia may have helped her gain citizenship and possibly bought her a modest home. She clutches at Eric and me and calls us her babies. Eric walks her to her car and holds the door as she climbs inside.
“You’re a good boy,” she says and smiles. “A very good boy,” which is exactly what he does not hear enough.
Before we leave, I see Eric walk up to Emory. Both men bow their heads and look at their shiny black shoes. My brother lights a cigarette and puts one hand in his jacket pocket.
“I was just wondering,” he says, “did my grandmother ever mention me?”
Emory unbuttons his jacket and exhales through his nose. He puts his hand on Eric’s shoulder and pulls him close, squinting into the wind.
During the summer of 2009, two years before she died, Cynthia took me on a cruise around the British Isles. It was an extravagant trip and I was both grateful and not, reticent to spend two weeks alone with her but thrilled to see more of the world. She treated me like a princess, taking me on shopping sprees through Harrods and Jenners, hordes of salesgirls fawning over me as if I were famous. We bought Gucci purses and Christian Louboutin shoes, a trousseau of lingerie and bottles of perfume that glittered like finely cut crystal. It was so far out of my realm of experience that I had a hard time taking it all in. In my real life, I struggled to buy cereal. She spent twice my student debt on luxury items. I couldn’t understand it. Had I asked her to instead pay off my loans she would have been galled, though she’d always preached education above all else. Her generosity was on her terms and was meant to buy my affection, and I had let it.
My favorite memory of Cynthia is something she made up. While she was often silly and helpless on this trip, donning her sunglasses while allowing the crew to wheel her around the ship (though she could walk when she wanted), she recounted a story afterward that never happened.
“You were so wonderful to me when I fell off the bed,” she said over the phone one day, months after our return. “Do you remember? The ship was tossing around and I fell between the bed and the wall. You walked in and I called out to you, ‘Jessie? Jessie? I’m over here!’ And you pulled me right up onto that bed.”
She laughed. I laughed back. I didn’t have the heart to say it never happened. She wanted to believe I would save her if I could.
HEIGHT OF THE LAND
NICK AND I leave at night, in the cold, with a thermos of over-steeped tea dripping onto the porch. We leave in our woolen hats, me in my mittens and downy winter coat, he in his flannel shirt and the tattered blue jeans that fall just a bit too short, ankles exposed. He calls his flannel a “jacket” because he grew up in Maine where “blood runs thick” and “sweat is saltier and does not freeze.” We walk cautiously and hold hands, feeling in the dark for cracks in the wooden porch and the heavy, cumbrous ice slicks that settle over the steps. We are leaving like “thieves in the night,” he says, vulpine and furtive, through a cloud of hot breath and steamy chamomile.
We just had sex on the living room floor, and for once I didn’t cry as I came, didn’t glimpse that small death just over the precipice.
I am going away again—I am excited—and he is going back, but we are going, and this is what matters. I like going, leaving, moving. Only yesterday I returned from a study abroad program in Italy, returned to the empty apartment and the abandoned college town of Durham. The roommates were still at their parents’ places, in slippers, feasting on Thanksgiving leftovers, turkey sandwiches and twice-baked potatoes. Nick picked me up at the airport in Manchester, New Hampshire, and we drove the hour back to Durham in near silence. We were groggy and disoriented from the sudden evaporation of distance, of the two months spent apart, unlearning the body. But it was not an uncomfortable silence, and I watched cows mill around the mud-slicked barns outside the window and he occasionally played with my hair. I stuck my finger in his ear and twice shoved a hand down his pants.
At the bottom of the steps, I hear the shuffling of the caged raccoon. He is tucked beneath the porch and looks out at us with raging yellow eyes, like neon blinkers reaching out from the depths of a black hole. His warm body heaves steadily inside the metal cage. A shackled creature, those terrible eyes like portals to some ghostly landscape where we might all quietly go mad, where I could placidly shed my clothes and roll in shit and chew on the cheeks of rodents.
The trap was rigged up this morning by Animal Services and baited with chicken bones. The raccoon had been spotted several times in daylight and the neighbors feared rabies. Six traps were set up around my block, under eaves and in the dusty forgotten corners of garages. Somehow, I knew he would end up with me, r
attling all day from beneath my porch. I listened from the kitchen window, afraid to go outside.
“I’m putting him in the car,” Nick says. “We’ll drop him off somewhere far away.”
He tugs his gloves on tighter, like a man in a boxing ring. He has the look of a welterweight, compact and quick, though he wears a lot of flannel shirts and jeans that are always a touch too short. Still, this is a handsome man: chiseled jaw and movie-star blue eyes, his thick sandy-colored hair cut short lest it begin to resemble a helmet. When he bends to pick up the cage, his shirt slides up his back and I glimpse skin so pale it glows. He looks excited, skittish, like he has an urge to wrestle the wild forces of nature. This look makes me nervous, for the raccoon and for myself.
“The hell you are,” I say. “Animal Services is coming to get him in the morning. They’ll do the dropping.” The raccoon begins to scramble inside his cage. The rickety contraption begins to rock violently. I fear it is going to topple over and set him free. “Please,” I say, “can we just go?”
I toss my bag inside the trunk and wait. Nick hesitates, watching the raccoon struggle. It hurts him to see any animal confined like that, the mental head-beating, the stunning confusion, that pure-white and splitting fear. As a kid, Nick spent too much time alone in the woods. I suspect that this is part of the reason he is so sensitive with animals and entirely distrusting of other human beings. When we go fishing, he does not let me keep any of the fat bass that we collect in the bucket. He insists we return them to the lake at the end of the day. I watch them longingly while I can, wishing I could fillet each one down to its pretty, delicate bones and cook the pearly flesh with lemon and sea grass. Instead, we kiss them each on the mouth and set them free.
Nick is not an only child, but his half brother is nine years older, and was married and out of the house by the time Nick was eight. The nearest potential playmate lived seven miles away. Nick built himself a little cabin just beyond the brush at the edge of his parents’ property where he stuffed his Highlights magazines into the makeshift mailbox at night. He was invariably delighted to find them there in the morning. He occupied himself with long solitary walks, tipping over dead or dying trees, and fishing at David Pond where his parents own a cabin only slightly sturdier than the pine construct Nick made himself. The cabin is twenty miles north of the family home and they spent every summer there since the year Nick turned six. His parents bought two used kayaks and taught both sons how to paddle, and then, as they got older, to glide silently into the lily pads and cast their fishing lines into the shade. They didn’t see Nick much after that. He left early in the mornings and only returned after dark, every fish carefully released back into the pond, his small, plump hands sticky with worm guts.
Nick doesn’t go to the cabin much anymore, but he wants to take me there on our way up north. We are going to journey from New Hampshire to northern Maine, where I will see my first moose. He has assured me of this. It was a great surprise and he told me quickly and in whispers as we lay on the floor, my unpacked bags tossed in a heap in the living room. I am all smiles, jittery with anticipation. He made plans for us to stay at a little bed-and-breakfast in Oquossoc, Maine. But first to the cabin, which is on our way, where there’s a broken window that needs fixing, and Nick can finally clean out the gutters. He can’t stop talking about it.
The first time Nick took me to the house he grew up in, I was shocked by the desolation of the town. I felt safe, though, and out of the way, as if I were stepping outside the current of time and watching my real life speed by without me—free to fall, free to smash into rocks. However it pleased.
By August the pastures are cleared, the hills rusted orange at their edges, as if by their proximity to the sun. The only neighbors are a family of farmers who live across the street. They raise turkeys that wander into his parents’ yard, poking their prehistoric faces into the bathroom window, which is low to the ground. Turkeys are very curious, unlike the chickens that huddle in tight congregations and squawk obscenities when I pass, no doubt sensing my urban beginnings—the particularly hurried gait. No, I am not interested in chickens, nor in raccoons. What I really want to see is a moose, to feel dwarfed by its immensity, to feel powerless and inconsequential, like Nick when he first came to Philadelphia and spent an entire afternoon gazing up at the skyscrapers.
I remember once reading a Cree legend about a grandmother who is also a moose. She gives her own two shinbones to her human grandson to use as ice picks during his travels, so that he can climb mountains. I think Nick would hand over his shinbones, too, but I’ll never ask. And maybe that is why I’ve come so far from home, from the scarred concrete streets of Philadelphia, to this quiet university in New Hampshire. Because the people I love keep dying, or else they are drowning in grief, and there is too much responsibility in all that grieving. It is selfish, I know, but I am learning to forgive myself. I left the place where people need me, and I need them, and I’m climbing mountains in this new relationship with a solid, healthy man from Maine. We are only a year old together, all animal instinct, and he still handles me like I am of a rare and reckless breed, like something that might take off running with the next rustle in the trees. And, truly, I might. This new consistency can be unnerving.
“Yeah, we can go,” Nick says, staring at the raccoon, his eyes narrowed, his hips squared and set north.
By the time we reach the family cabin on David Pond it is a shivering dawn. The trees are heavy with snow and droopy like sulking children. The car crunches over rocks and dirt and I am not entirely sure that we are going the right way, but it is not a good time to argue. Neither of us has slept. The pond looks more like a lake to me, but I don’t push this anymore. Nick says my idea of a lake is the “disease-infested cesspools peddling as swimming pools just off city side streets.” I don’t tell him that as kids, my brother and I weren’t allowed to swim in public pools, so we splashed around in fountains instead, picking up pennies with our toes and listening for the ice cream truck.
“I found my Dad in one of those once,” I say. “He was floating on one of those pool rafts with his work boots still on.”
We pull into the driveway and Nick turns off the car. I feel the cold immediately, like a swift slap to the face. The passenger window in Nick’s old Toyota never closes all the way.
“Was he drunk?” he says after a while.
“I don’t think so. He just looked tired. I was rushing home from school and didn’t stop to ask.”
“Well,” he says.
We sit in the car for many minutes, too tired to move. The sun breaks over the frozen pond, catching in the cracks like flames. Nick closes his eyes and leans back against the headrest. I watch clumps of snow slip from the elbows of tree branches and tumble to the ground, breaking apart as they fall, disintegrating in the colorless light. I feel heavy. A wet cold is snaking around my ankles. There is a piece of cloud in my eye and a liquor burn on my lips. The cabin is behind us, and in my half-sleep I leave my body and move toward the shore. I reach under the snow and pick clean the bones that peek out of the dirt, fingering the joints that fall apart in my hands. These are old graves and they threaten to split wide and pull me under; the moonless current is strong here. I see Nick from a great distance, that gentle soul, a boy really, snoring lightly, disturbing no one. I want to keep moving, always, but I know we need to rest.
He opens his eyes. He is watching me. He wipes at my face and pulls me toward him, holding my head to his chest. We don’t make it into the cabin. There isn’t any heat inside anyway. Every few hours, I hear Nick start the engine and feel the dry heat blowing on my neck.
We sleep like this for most of the morning, and then make sandwiches with the white bread and lunchmeat he packed in a cooler.
We sing as we drive—a song we make up about moose. Going on a moose hunt . . . That’s all we have, so we sing this chorus over and over and dance wildly in our seats, beating time on the dashboard. We lost radio reception a while back
, soon after we pulled away from the cabin. Before we left, Nick filled three black trash bags with the wet leaves from the gutters while I carefully pulled large sections of broken glass from a splintered window frame, flakes of white paint disappearing in the snow. I watched Nick as he nailed a thin piece of plywood over the window hole, his face flushed and his tongue hanging out like it does when he is concentrating. He is thin but solid, and he moves with such willfulness that I almost stumble or weep, so earnest is that man, so devoid of all my prickly cynicism.
Now, we are moving on. We are looking for moose. Waves of shadow skip across the highway in front of us. A squirrel runs into the middle of the road, trembles, then darts for the bushes. Afternoon dissolves silently into dusk, bowing and graceful as she slinks off to bed. I am eating a banana I bought at a gas station five miles back. Eventually, we grow sick of singing about moose and begin to sing about bananas.
If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir Page 11
