Local Souls

by Allan Gurganus

  I now spied, following Matt’s sleek convertible, a dented support car wrapped in its own blue exhaust. Mr. Shelburne got out carrying Cait’s cocker. He spied me, looked away, then nodded, acting chagrined yet proud to have any role, however supporting. Gauging the crowd, so trying to be of use to Cait, Stan hoisted her pup ten inches higher. The crowd went, “Oooh.” Stan had proved his—if not importance—then glum efficiency here.

  I turned half-aside. The two moms flanking me tensed. They had not exactly clapped when Cait’s procession arrived. Mrs. Winooski muttered so I’d have to overhear, “Oh, look. Li’l ‘Mother Theresa’ has turned up, late.” These other women scanned my face. They’d just witnessed how Stan’s role in my daughter’s life had sunk to this level janitorial. The two stepped inches nearer. They must have assumed, as I once did, that Shelburne and I would likely be lovers.

  Millicent’s mom and Winooski’s now swapped looks. They seemed to have prepared a little speech. “We . . . we’ve come to more . . . respect you, Jean. For how you planned her service . . . For all you did to help ease at least the rest of our Falls community through this. You didn’t get stuck feeling sorry for yourself as either of us might. Nobody knows how you did it. And, even finding a man who could and would write that much music so quick, well . . . And paying out of pocket for a big-time orchestra. And now all he can find to do is . . .” Here, newer darker looks were transmitted, received. I could only nod my thanks.

  “The terrible thing,” Winooski went on. “Since your girl got so much of the class attention growing up, is how . . . when she . . . died, drowned, whatever, we hated ourselves. But even so, us class moms we did start hoping . . . (this not easy) . . . we admitted hoping our daughters might finally have their own merits seen a little better. Really great gals, ours, too. In any other class but hers? they might’ve been . . . And now she’s back. Which is great of course. But we do feel at times she’s . . . your Cait can be a little . . . much. Still, it has at least let us see YOU more clearly, Jean. With some . . . new feeling. Oh and we’re sorry about going off on you about the cold spaghetti you passed off as bats’ intestines. Halloween is for scaring and you sure do a job on our neighbor kids, but they line up for it, don’t they? Now we justget you better, is all. You know, we decided over wine last night . . . you’re the very thing she keeps trying to . . . be. So, for all that we got wrong—before she died and all—we’re sorry. And, well, you just go, ole girl!”

  How “ole”? I must be at least a year younger than these two.

  Go where? The Outer Banks?

  Still, I thanked them. Most of our picnic crowd yet milled about focused on Caitie. Having chopped off the henna, she now looked like a blond boy with dandelion fluff, creating a trend. A vogue she knew would not look good on any of her eight overnight copycats.

  But what finally counted was how these moms, after leveling with me, now literally touched me. Brave girls. Had they practiced this, as I’d once prepped to turn Stan’s pages? Each woman placed an open palm against opposing sides of my own lower back, for just two warming seconds, maybe four.

  While everybody else aimed toward the most famous person in our town now, two decent ordinary women slightly older than I smiled beside me, as my guardians. Behind our pooled grins, to either side of me, they remained in touch if only for three secs, four. That was all. Just checking in.

  “Bless you both,” I said, quiet. “Always surprising to be noticed.”

  They had treated me as two loving daughters might a mom they loved. For me, it was something, was truly something.

  —Of course, they probably had no idea what they’d just done.

  XIII

  AFTER THIS, OUR MOTHER-DAUGHTER SKIRMISHES, Cait’s and mine, surpassed earlier dog-and-cat fights. She kept mentioning having always wished to live in California, not Falls. And I kept recalling Stan—his following Caitlin in that debased role of puppy-dog-transport. Or what irked her buying new clothes that made bare feet contrast with chosen skirts that looked like Las Vegas’s idea of a French schoolgirl? Whatever started our tiffs, they came almost daily now. They concerned earlier tiffs, or even likely weather, or Place Names for 100. Soon as we started, twins packed up their homework and cereal bowls and left the room.

  Cait: “And what’re you staring at?”

  Jean: “My eighteen-year-old daughter. Why? Along with the photographers, do I need an appointment?”

  C: “Wish you had asked up-front if I was down with your blacking my eye.”

  J: “‘Purpled,’ tops. And now you’re getting that nice new yellow along its edges. Hon, I was just fighting to keep breathing. I had a thing over my head, couldn’t see what my knuckles caught. Please don’t scold your mom for having grieved for you, Cait.”

  C: “Guess that’s just one of the ways we’re different. I am so not as you describe me. You, now, do take good care mainly of yourself then your kids. Your concern is, I’d say, national and more for local souls. Whereas I guess I’ll always be a bit more involved with . . .”

  J: “‘The World’? Tell me you were not going to say that. You sound like a Miss Universe Contestant. Let’s see, hmmn: You’re Global and I’m Falls’ Broken Heart Country Club golf course. That your best shot, my dear returned Prodi-gal?”

  C: “‘Prodi-GAL’? And that’s you being clever. You think? Mom, if you were applying somewhere with that? you would not get even wait-listed. I’ve never doubted your volume on the intellectual Richter-scale. Whatever your barometer IQ is today, nobody’s ever called you stupid. People have called you scary, but . . . I’m just glad we went online and found you that Elizabeth Bishop conference. I know you’ll meet lots of other people like you. I have some leftover summer spending-money I truly want to chip in for tuition, book costs. Okay, I’m a handful. But you knew that. You’ve been my life-coach fight-manager, whatever. You taught me to read, ’m I right? Just hope you find some peace is all. I guess until the person gets right with herself, she . . .”

  (And this was a calmish day. This, while we stood preparing our separate dietetic breakfasts . . .)

  FINALLY, MY OWN family considered me so cross, so critical, that Eddie and the Lady Tiffany Philosophy moved east into our house on Milford Cul-de-Sac. They promised they would “spell” me for a while. “Let me do it for you. J-E-A-N.” Silence on the phone.

  Muttering, I kept rememorizing my funeral poem from The Book of Common Prayer while attending my favorite new irregular French verb: “Suffire: “To be enough, be sufficient.” Why isn’t there one such English verb for saying all of that at once?

  Caitlin had been phoning her dad. After our daily flare-up, I’d see her out there, all but chewing her little cell, still somehow with her. She’d be barefoot, striding back and forth, pacing inside our backyard’s fence like some veldt-dwelling cat unfairly zooed. She’d wave her arm, head shaking. She wore enough African junk jewelry so she clinked like a tribal gift shop.

  Cait continued nightly snitching to California, to her glamour parent: how the Warden had lost her remaining mind, such small margin as was left. Claimed I was now taking it all out on her. Swore I had pulverized her face on Night 1 (“like hamburger,” I heard at least those words). And just when she’d needed to look her best for both Matts and print-journalism. She hinted that whenever her pals came over now, I was always in the room, referring to the good ole days . . . when she was, like, dead.

  Cait told Edward I had begun wearing short skirts; that I kept bothering BlackMatt plus my hangdog married sob-sister Mr. Shelburne with my indispensable oatmeal-raisin cookie deliveries to home and school. Well, I’d bought one or two black crepe-y outfits as possibles for her big service. It shocks her to imagine that people could have really liked me, just for me. But in some ways, Caitlin being Caitlin, she is partly-mainly right.

  It’s just: Jean here had nowhere to take it, all the stuff I’d learned. I’d felt so close to others, and for going on three weeks. Together we’d constructed such a project: the The
atre of Caitlin Mulray Memory.

  Around my house, I’d set out the biggest available boxes of Kleenex. Every handy ledge and coffee table was readied for grieving’s leakage outbursts.

  —You bring up children so they can leave you easily and well. Mission accomplished. But, what have I kept preparing myself for? For those years when I’ll finally be alone at home? When I can take fun college classes and at last earn the BA? Cait’s pregnancy interrupted? Would there come a time when I might dust off my own poetry, maybe finally find time to make a few best friends?

  Sylvia Plath has been done to death, I know. She did get her deserved Pulitzer, but posthumously. She was right at thirty. So fed up with her poor mental health, with a wandering husband however talented, with those kids keeping constant English colds. Came a day she just stuffed wet towels under the kitchen door, protecting sleeping children from the world outside and herself in here. She attached her doctor’s phone number to the baby carriage’s handle. Then she rammed her pretty head into the gas oven, far far back in, the reports all say. She wanted motherhood-divorce-writing over and done. Worn flat out, a mind that rare.

  Well, let me say this only once: I did not do that.

  MY DARLING DAUGHTER does look excellent on-paper and off. She photographs like a film star, no angle “bad.” Tests well, too. Writes sestinas about homelessness that will make you cherish your hall thermostat. But you try living with her.

  Especially now she’s back from Tarzan Country Day. She has delivered to favorite elderly neighbors little beaded napkin rings made by what she colonially calls “her” people. These trinkets are, in fact, so Pottery Barn. She can’t see that. And of course I’ll never tell her.

  I know my girl is considered the greatest kid in many a local generation; her classmates even date things using her: The Summer Caitlin Mulray Didn’t Know We Thought She’d Drowned.

  —HOW DOES ANYONE survive? And where is Caitkins now? Falls High is in session. French IV, Miss Finson, room 214. Classes change in six minutes. Where does she think I am?

  Oh she is not thinking of me. I’ve been that good a mother.

  Sainthood? Give me its SAT. I swear I’ll ace the bugger.

  XIV

  IT FEELS RIGHT, MY SAILING NOW. SOMEHOW I AM ALONE and at least not seasick, bound for the tourist inn and its back-deck seminar. Look, that must be our island dead ahead. Twisty wind-bent trees, not one polluting car in sight. I learned about this boardinghouse in the back of Smithsonian. Quite the li’l adventuress. Others attendees will likely sit clutching their own blue Elizabeth Bishop study binder.

  I picture them at tomorrow’s breakfast all wearing Abercrombie safari outfits, sun hats, a few pith helmets. Me, dressed in green boots, and my clothes-ure. Then I understand I’ve imagined heading toward my own junior-year in Africa. Does this imply unconscious competition with my daughter who somehow survived that continent? If so, I’m vaguely unaware of it.

  Others at the table will be birder-widows, lady-librarians similarly unattached. Gals who saw that same attractive little ad in the magazine’s classifieds, with its alluring lead word Unique.

  Part of me hopes the owner of this Ocracoke B&B will get to phone Eddie at any ole alarming hour, yelling how a nest of sharks has finished me. Ed now sleeps on the king-sized bed in my own bedroom, once also his; he rests beside his new li’l lady, his “littler” lady. Tiffany does adore our kids. I must say that for her. She will always be childless and so has wisely made a cult of his, mine. If I do become fish-food, Eddie will know I took the violent underwater death our Caitlin escaped. One thing’s sure: no one will pay three thousand to FedEx me home.

  The day I was to fly off and catch this ferry, Edward and Tiffany arrived by black limo. It’s a fancy airport taxi, really, other customers along. Even so it put my rusty station wagon to shame. Californians clamber forth all brown and lean, looking thirty-eight in matching chinos. Cait scampers out front and jumps him, legs wrapped clear around. Then the twins hoot into our front-yard. I, wearing slenderizing black, carrying a plate of my much-praised oatmeal cookies, follow.

  I’ve hoped to stage-manage this reunion indoors, with more control of lighting. Ed shouts my way, “Well, Jean, we got our baby back, eh?” He finally turns to me and, luggage in hand, my ex says, “Whoa, this has sure put a few pounds and years on you.”

  We stand here. Tiffany studies her sandals; Caitlin, feeling vindicated, stares only at Edward. I am considering cookies’ texture when I hear Nicholas tell his father: “Mom’s been brave. And saying that was mean.”

  Group silence seems almost a victory. I fight not to cry.

  “Sorry,” Ed tells us. “Just concerned was all. But my timing sounds as thoughtless as Jean’s always said it was. Right, folks? And here at this choice moment, too. Guess I . . . should’ve come sooner. To help. And Tif here told me so. —Sorry, guys, for blowing that, too. But who loves you-all?” Ed insists on high-fives all around.

  “Lunch, anybody? A light Niçoise salad?” And, turning—though worried how I’ll look from behind—I do still walk into my house, my right hand resting on Nicholas’s blessed shoulder.

  I have never felt so defended by a man.

  My son just made me feel, for one long second, like Saint Somebody myself.

  AS I LEFT, the twins asked why I’d need these waders. “You’re going to the beach, Ma, not the jungle.”

  “Well, but you know how I hate getting sand into everything. And though they swear the hurricane season just ended, has anybody told the hurricanes?” Nobody laughs anymore at my jokes. If they ever did. Such quips now make me sound disconnected. Even to me. The very rites of grief prove Indian-given. You think enough ten-mile beach-walks will heal me? —I wear these boots because I bore a daughter who gave away my shoes, a few pairs at a time, till I quite literally stood barefoot as Eden’s First Lady.

  I WORRY HOW his second wife will know that Patrick must have his super-crunch on wheat, whereas smooth on white means Nicholas. Then I realize, the boys’re nearly eleven. If it matters, they will simply state their needs to good-natured Tiffany. I’ll get to go back after three weeks. (Doesn’t that seem cruelly long for what I did?) I will resume my station on Milford Cul-de-Sac. (Literally means bottom of the bag.) My sons will always love me.

  Odd, I can picture all three of my children with their own kids. Caitlin, whatever her chosen career, will have two, minimum, so she cannot be said to have missed so seminal an experience. Soon as she’s “with child” she’ll know me far better. The time-bomb of it in you, the soul that is in it and therefore you, your responsibility now. But that soul owes you nothing.

  At least the twins understood. We, after all, survived—as a unit—her surviving. The boys are still so innocent they can frontally humor and honor their workhorse mom. Twins’ friends still come to pee, with me one room away, not thinking to turn on the sink or hide their sounds. Trusted music, if brief.

  My children will all be great parents! I just know. Surely that says something, Jean. You yourself might be too full of crazed nuance. But, somehow, you were the only one on earth willing to stay in a house with them and do the doggone work. At least my boys still notice.

  CAITLIN’S ACTED EXTRA-KIND to most everyone on earth. Even at age three, she was giving our blond cocker such care and imagination.

  “Get a life, Mom,” Cait has told and told me. She cannot bear to see: She is that. She’s the only somebody this particular whatever has ever really had. I didn’t choose this job slot from a list. Never asked to be divorced, left solitary as an oyster. But turns out, rearing brilliant or quasi-brilliant kids is the destiny I drew. Caitlin Mulray is my luck. And at least, through her first death, such luck still holds. (Come to think of it, only Mary the Mother of Christ and I belong to this very tiny Resurrected Children Club!)

  To be fair to myself, to briefly sing or celebrate myself, I have tried to keep her coated in sunblock. Screened from the burden of knowing how, all along, she’s been my Sun it
self. “Get a life”: Easy to snap at the very force that started yours!

  For years I’ve nagged her about attending Radcliffe, my former dream-school. And only yesterday, as I drove her through rain toward Falls High that last time, did she bring it up.

  “Actually, Mom, never wanted to correct you, specially not in front of others. But that’s all called Harvard now. There’s been no such one-sex school as Radcliffe for, like, decades. —Not to date you, Momma Jean.”

  You aren’t supposed to mind your teenager shushing you. But when they die then come back, you feel its sting a wee bit more.

  SINCE HER REBIRTH, I have been remembering my own first chances. I was once five, Cait’s age when Bongo very nearly made off with her. As a child I often found myself left safe at home, locked into our big 1939 Colonial at the best end of The River Road. Dad would drive off to his law office; Mother had just barked downstairs that I must bring her an iced drink. Mom, argumentative on principle, could never keep help. Instead she’d given birth to a live-in.

  I knew the drill. Though physically clumsy, I fought with an old-timey ice-tray. It stuck to my short hands in such horrifying sucking ways. I loosened her ice, the required three cubes. Age five, I got up onto a chair, fetched down her favorite crystal glass; I found the oval silver tray inherited. (Another later Baby-Cait-Goodwill casualty). I folded diagonally a cloth napkin, creasing so it stood up like the Pope’s miter. Finally I filled Ice’s glass. Coldest tap water. Let it run three minutes. Then, with full tumbler and reflecting tray held precarious before me, I approached our carpeted stairs.

  I understood that if I spilled, even a drop, she would send me clear back down. I must start over. I didn’t understand why, but these were her terms. I still recall the portrait-peculiarities of those twelve steps leading toward her sitting area in the bedroom’s brightest bay window. Stairs number three and eleven creaked. She would be stretched there, waiting, wearing white gloves filled with cold cream, cold cold cream; she’d be arranged just so, sometimes in a white satin robe matching the very upholstery of her pale chaise. Did she hope to make furniture more her outfit or turn herself into a luxury seating destination? Though prone, she showed me she had been waiting.