Hieroglyphics

by Jill McCorkle

  It was December, and there were trees and lights everywhere. Your father was wearing a dark-green wool scarf that I later learned had once belonged to his father, and when his train approached, he hastily asked what I was doing the next day, and we made plans to meet there in that same place after work.

  “It would take more than that to hook me,” I had said in a moment of great confidence. For a long time after, we joked about bait and lures; he wrote me a little note that said I was “so a-luring.” In fact, our very first Christmas tree was decorated with the lures and tackle we’d bought for each other in those earliest days. I still have them all (bits of silver and feathers like exotic jewelry), and I often think how you might one day find them and wonder, “What is this old rusty junk?” Some look a lot like the earrings Becca once wore during her poncho, Indian beads, and moccasin days. “So alluring.” You might have heard us say that.

  September 1, 1964

  I love the dance school. It’s slow going but a work in progress. We had fun thinking of a name: My Turn, or That’s the Pointe, or simply Lil’s School of Dance, which is what I ultimately went with, if for no other reason than it suits me (it’s not cute or witty, just straightforward). The squat cinder-block building was once a tire store but, with paint and new floors, has now been transformed into a sanctuary: barres, wall-length mirrors, a tiny dressing room with cubbies, a shelf filled with items ordered for these first students (lamb’s wool and leg warmers, Capezio shoes and Danskin tights). I love when I am there all alone.

  I look at Margot some days and think if my mother returned as a dog, that would be her, paws in first position, graceful and alert, refined one moment and silly the next. “Is that you?” I whispered the other day, and Margot cocked her head and returned my stare. “Are you here?”

  February 1974

  If I put my foot behind my head every single day, do an arabesque on pointe, and hold it there, can I trick time? I like to think about that and, in fact, am going to hold myself to a schedule. Every day, same time, like a clock. Will it work? We will see, but first I have to get Becca to the orthodontist; we’re all hoping she can stop wearing “the strap,” and Jeff has hockey, and there is a PTA meeting I can’t skip since I’m one of the officers (what was I thinking?!), so my plans to put my foot behind my head and then stand on pointe indefinitely might have to wait until tomorrow. BRB.

  Spring 1980

  I love recitals. I love preparing the dancers for their parts. Sometimes I read stories aloud; sometimes we watch films that match the ballet. The story of Romeo and Juliet was one we watched when you were a student, Becca; a circle of 15-year-old girls at the theater for the Zeffirelli version shrieking in delight to see Romeo’s bare butt. You all knew the story (you had read it in English class), but you watched faithfully, all hoping for the very best and happiest of endings. And yet Romeo still died. Don’t we all harbor the hope, the wish, that something magnificent will happen? Don’t we all marvel at how easily we can get lost within a work of art? That’s what dance has always meant to me. I can get as lost watching as I can in my own movement to music, feet gliding as if on autopilot.

  The recital of “Romeo and Juliet” was not one of the best given. That boy from Wellesley who’d volunteered to help since we had so few boys in class overplayed the comic appeal of Mercutio’s character and kept springing back to life for one more little dance. I wanted to slap him for getting in the way of what should have been a poignant part, but in the end it didn’t matter. Parents did not like how few parts there were for the little ones, and more than one said that there was way too much death for the children to understand. Such is my occupational hazard, and so back to woodland fairies and “The Nutcracker” I go, bribing little Polichinelles to stay under Mother Ginger’s skirt until the right moment, and explaining why we all can’t be Clara.

  (Shred?)

  “What did you tell her about me?” I asked Frank when it was clear to me that something had happened and he was avoiding the conversation. More than what they might have done physically was the sickening thought that he had shared any intimate details about my life, my mother’s death, our children, our dogs; it was the era of Margot and Rudolf, Margot winding down, cloudy eyes and gray streaks in her muzzle, her apricot coat laced with white as well. I felt threatened and protective of anything linked to our home.

  “Oh, come on, Lily.”

  “Don’t call me that!” I nearly spat in his face. “Only my mother calls me that.” I said how there is nothing cheaper and more superficial than someone unauthorized stealing and using another’s pet name.

  “Did you tell her our word?” I said.

  “Of course not!”

  I had found little traces and pieces: a note in his pocket—a phone number, a street address on the fringes of Cambridge, which I later drove past—a pink office memo slip like the secretaries in his department used to fill out and leave in his mailbox (“While you were out . . .”). One remained rolled up there near the matchbooks on his dresser: a call at 3 on a Wednesday afternoon; the message: “Tomb Time.” Book title? Lecture idea?

  I asked myself: “Can you spell stupid? Can you spell b-l-i-n-d?”

  March 2017

  Southern Pines

  Have I ever told you two how often in the dull waking of morning I sometimes have the sensation that I am there walking our old neighborhood? I pass your elementary school, I pass the yard with that strange sculpture we never figured out (you two called it the Giant Egg; the neighbors called it an eyesore), and I pass the mailbox I always used, that beautiful chestnut tree on the corner, and the house with the beautiful rose garden, and I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t someone walking along Aspen Avenue or Grove Street in these moments who thinks she glimpses someone she’s never seen wandering there, that dogs and babies stop and stare out into the nothingness of me as I pass through my old life. My feet and hands are never cold, as they always were, and I am never worried about my little dance school, which was almost always in the red, or what to prepare for dinner or if I have called to check on my father. The thoughts are just about walking, about one foot in front of the other, about making my way around our neighborhood and anticipating you two coming home from school. Sometimes, I wake with a vivid recall of a certain sweater or a pair of shoes, or with my fingers pinched, as if I am holding a feather or a rock or a leaf or a penny, all those things I have always collected.

  If you’ve ever wondered where I keep my my stash of little treasures, I will tell you now. The wooden box high on the shelf in my closet. My father’s hat, the Kleenex my mother kissed, the lipstick barely there now, an eyelash I once wished on right before I met your father, carefully taped to a piece of paper (wishing on an eyelash was a belief held by the coworker at Filene’s whose name I can’t recall!). The beads that were on your perfect little wrists right after you were born, the cards that said your name and gender there in the nursery viewing room. Letters. Notes. My father’s scribbles: BRB.

  I’ve always known that I am not the kind of woman your father is naturally attracted to. I think his eye is drawn to my opposite: the brightly plumed strutters. His young colleague was of the plumed sort; Becca, think Carla Robinson in your high school class (remember? the girl who, like an ill-trained dog or toddler, always wanted what someone else had), except that this young woman was the high-voltage of a Carla coupled with a scholarly pedigree and some genuine academic success, which perhaps was just the right combination (or wrong, from my point of view). She was (perhaps still is) the kind of person who makes you want to cross yourself when you see them coming.

  “Harsh,” I can hear your father say. “You are so harsh.”

  I say truthful.

  I love the memory of your father watching me as I passed a silly orange under my chin, onto the throat of a handsome young man in banking, originally from Chicago, Juicy Fruit gum and tobacco and that awful pineapple punch on his breath. That’s the memory I should give you. I didn’t even know y
our father, and on the walk home he seemed jealous of that total stranger I had stood so close to, a man I could have just as easily walked with that night. Now, that is not bigheaded of me to say; trust me that the competition was slim, but I did appreciate how attentive your father was as it neared time to leave. The walk to the train with him that night is still a place I like to go in my mind. I go there, and I wait outside your elementary school. I lie in my childhood bed and watch my mother descend the stairs.

  People say hearts get broken all the time. They say people die all the time. But what does that help? What does that even do, other than attempt to diminish the emotions at hand. I hope I haven’t done that to you, though I suspect in all these years that I have, that there have been times in my attempt to make you feel better you might have felt I was slighting your pain. Such a tricky balance. The key word is always balance. I cannot hear that word without picturing the little windup seal that was always in your toy box. Becca, you were barely the size of a grain of rice when your father bought it. I was vomiting several times a day, and whenever I came out of the bathroom of that old tiny apartment there in Cambridge, the tile of the bathroom so cold, your father would have the seal wound up so that the little red ball spun on the tip of its nose. We lost the seal somewhere along the way, but the ball is still there in the box.

  My mother read “The Red Shoes” to me many times in childhood. That poor girl punished for wanting those shoes and wanting to dance. I remember sitting, the book on my lap, my mother beside me on the bed. I read “The Red Shoes” to you as well, and it always made you beg for “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” a much happier story for sure. A girl punished for her desires and sentenced to amputation or death, or a man rewarded for his acts of generous charity? My mother loved all the sad ones: “The Little Match Girl” and “The Little Mermaid” (the real version). She would have loved the movie “The Red Shoes,” which came out six years after she died. It was 1948, and I was 15 years old. Moira Shearer had to choose between her true love and being a famous dancer. I could imagine my mother in that high whine of hers: “Why did they make her choose?” And actually, I wondered the same thing. I didn’t sleep for weeks after, haunted by the harrowing final scene, where she goes after her true love only to go sailing out in front of a train.

  In fact, I thought of that scene the first night I met your father and we stood there on the platform, and of course was so glad later that I had not mentioned it. I saw the movie a second time when I was in college, and it all held up for me; I was studying bookkeeping, which is what most girls did then. I loved psychology, and I loved literature, too.

  For many years when I thought of my mother, I had to walk through the Cocoanut Grove to get to any other memories. I had to imagine where she might have been, what part of the building, what table, when she realized that her life was in danger. Then I had to traverse the lobby of Mass General, the large clock ticking, my father’s hands clasped, and then Southern Mortuary, to those terrible moments staring at her blackened hand exposed there on the white sheet.

  I wanted to be like my mother, but I recognize our differences. I am someone interested in shoes that blend in—the feathered plumes of a more cautious bird, one safely sheltered in a nest; I like black leather or the pale pink of ballet slippers, soft as skin. I like shoes that blend, protect, comfort. Even now, I see young women clomping along in their boots or stilettos, heels so high their knees often bow out like someone just off of a horse, or about to have a gynecological procedure. I have seen Polly and Lindsey, in fact; Becca, you know it is true. I feel a pain in my lower back to watch, jarred by the clip-clopping that counteracts what is meant to appear smooth and sophisticated and sexy. You yourself wore those way-up platforms in high school, and I was amazed you never broke something. Those shoes are for sitting, legs crossed, perhaps with a sign that says “I am exotic, like an animal in the zoo.” My mother liked being noticed. She liked the flamboyant accessories: the flamingo, the peacock.

  In my fantasies, I often wear peacock blue or Moroccan red. And whenever I imagine confronting people, I am always dressed vibrantly, in clothes I never would really wear in life. I remain the colors of soft earth; I am sandalwood, buff. I am careful. That’s why I stretched out beside you all those nights, my head leaned close enough to smell the milky scent of your sighs, to see your chests rise and fall, feel your breath. “I’m here. Mommy’s here,” I whispered if you shifted in your sleep.

  Lately, I don’t trust what your father says, and what a shock that has been after these many good years that restored my faith. Every time he leaves the house, I question if he is really going where he says he is going. One day, he said he was going to have his car serviced, but later when I called, that wasn’t true. I almost confronted him when he came home, but then something about the way he acted, something so fragile, made me keep the questions to myself.

  “A hastening,” he had said. He has never been a very good liar, and I love this about him, though these days it concerns me. Sometimes, when I am there walking the old neighborhood, I see his car pull into the driveway, and then I follow his steps into the house.

  Shelley

  The jury will return later today, and she is still wandering Food Lion, waiting for the judge to call. The manager has asked her twice if she needs help, and so now she has a cart and is slowly filling it and then putting things back to kill time. She is ready. She wants to hear the verdict. She wants to see that awful man’s face and hear the news she is hoping will come. All rise for the judge. All rise for the judge, and in her mind, she can see the whole room, the dark wood and the brass rail, the dirty windows and the cobwebs she has been studying for several weeks now. Guilty. People from all over the community will be there—the grand finale of this long-running show. And the judge will probably be so relieved to have it all end; this case has aged her there in her expensive burgundy pumps and those gold knot earrings she wears every day, but that is the last thing that Shelley would ever say—even to Marva—for fear of getting in trouble, and it reminds her again how alone she is.

  The surgeon who repaired Harvey’s lip was very kind, and she’d stared at his clean, agile brown hands as he spoke and explained everything to her. All during the trial, she has had to remind herself of this so she won’t throw out the whole of a profession based on one rotten egg. It isn’t fair to judge that way even though it is so easy to look at a whole group and point to the one they resemble or remind you of. But people could do that to her, too, and it wouldn’t be fair. People could do that to Jason or to Harvey. People did it to that young girl who got murdered, seeing only the mess of her life, a needle in her arm, and not the love she felt for her young son, not all that she had endured that had led her to such a dark and frightening place. And did she hear Brent say “harelip,” or did she imagine that, too? “No one says that anymore,” she told him. “No one is perfect.”

  Brent had grown up with parents who believed that bad things happened to people who had not lived right, and he said their affection for Harvey would have been compromised by that, and Shelley said, well, then she was glad they were dead, and he looked like he wanted to slap her. Even though he agreed with her, his impulse was to defend them and their old backward ways. She and Brent disagreed on so many things, like he liked that creepy Elf on the Shelf and wanted to get one so Harvey would behave better, but she said everybody needs privacy and that kind of spying is just wrong. Now the memory leaves her cold, leaves her studying the house for signs of someone watching her. She hated the way people say God is always watching you and remembers asking, “Even when I pee?” And being sent from a classroom. She is sure what she felt then is what Harvey is feeling all those times he is standing there beside the bed waiting for her to wake. “Mom? Mom?” His breath like old chocolate milk and Starburst candies.

  Shelley has not always told the truth, and now it is all coming and filling her head as she watches people holding up their right hands and swearing to tell the truth, t
he whole truth, nothing but the truth, and sometimes a word will fly in and get stuck, like fly to flypaper, lint on an album; like the way the word purchase keeps flying in, the word perhaps having a little surge in popularity, as words often do. Lately it has gotten traction. If you were someone hearing voices or reading signs, you might think this has meaning, you might think it is a sign. And she does. She does think that. Harvey has put a note in the pocket of her sweater, and it is in his little code, but she can’t take the time to study it now. Klingon. He keeps begging her to teach him shorthand. Jason told him computer coding would be much more lucrative, and she felt so proud to hear her son use such words: lucrative, coding.

  Waiting is hard. When she was a child, she used that time to clean; she liked to go through things and organize, to find a little bit of order. Each doll had its own place on the shelf; each stuffed animal was assigned the right spot on her bed. Once, when she was in sixth grade, she saved her money to buy Hefty trash bags—the giant heavy plastic ones like they have at hardware stores, for removing debris from construction sites; her brother drove her to buy them and said, “Good luck with that,” but he didn’t really think she could change anything. He said their mother and grandmother would still sit there in their bathrobes, surrounded by stacks of paper, and their dad would still pile up burned-out appliances—toasters, electric razors, hair dryers, blown lamps, radios—out on the back porch, where Shelley thought there should be a hammock with a quilt on it and little pillows. She thought if she surprised them and started cleaning that everyone would pitch in, like all the little birds and mice in Cinderella.