How could I have … followed by the banal list of things to be ashamed of.
I was young when I met Walter. I was still young though I forgot. And Mr. Early, he was not so very old when he died. Funny man, he had only grayed. That was at Nonna’s funeral, last time I saw him. Mr. Early had said, “We should have coffee. We should talk.” We stood looking at each other, standing in the slivery, leftover rain, nodding through condolences. Mr. Early said, “We should talk, Alice,” and I said, “Yes, I’ll call,” and then, of course, I didn’t.
How could I …?
I drove around the countryside, saying good-bye to it all. Aunt Frances and Uncle Billy had retreated to the desert; they rarely called. I don’t know why I didn’t.
How could I …?
“Okay,” slowed-down, drawn-out, second syllable stressed O-kays from Mr. Early to stupid answers. I made a lot of them, but I was enthusiastic in my responses, excited by patterns and symbols and irony. I tried never to miss class though I had headaches that took me out of math.
One time Mr. Early looked in on me at the nurse’s office, surely a father’s gesture. “So, so Alice. …” Is this the most of his voice I can remember? I have to strain to hear him speak. “Let’s talk poems!” Let’s talk stories and novels. Why can’t I remember more? He loved sound, the way a sentence sounded. Mr. Early did not hang his hat on plot.
His wife was a painter.
“This is Ellen Early,” she said. Ellen Early, the loved wife with an unlovely voice, saying “I know how you felt about Ed.” But did she, I wondered — did I?
He called me the worst speller. I don’t remember what I said, but afterward I looked up every word I was unsure of. Exaggerated—I misspelled it how many times? I had to come up with ways of remembering. I wanted to be taken seriously although mostly I think I was cute.
Once out-of-doors, Mr. Early surprised me, and his expression, when I turned, was so suddenly and purely affectionate that whatever I had done to provoke it, I wanted to do it again. For Mr. Early loved me, yes, I saw this. Later he wrote me as much.
Mrs. Early, on the telephone, was saying, “… if it had to be anywhere …”
Were my letters to him as full of love?
His letters at the end had narrow margins; he had so much to say. I could hear his mouth juice-up as he talked. He was happy. He wasn’t drinking anymore; he had given up his pipe; he had more breath. “I never really noticed dogs,” in his postscript, “and now I see who they are, and I love them.”
MOTHER
A LOT OF WHAT I said was mean and full of blame and said to make my mother cry, but then, when she did cry, I was embarrassed (this happened often), and I went to the kitchen to get us new drinks.
She called out, “Come light up one of your funny cigarettes and blow it in my face.”
After a while we were laughing. “We were laughing out of all proportion to the joke of Uncle Billy as a young man in the desert, scuffed saddle shoes and khaki shorts and the kind of hat explorers wear in jungle movies. Uncle Billy! Wild Billy! Those skinny legs! Those prominent knees! We laughed.
We laughed, but Mother cried again when I told her Uncle Billy was no longer prospecting but swatting at shrubbery with his cane. I had seen him; I knew. Mother cried, and I felt sad, too.
How young Uncle Billy was when he acted as a father to me, this explorer in the photograph with so much boy left in his face. His stories! In one the prospector was packed on his donkey and sent headless into town. On the cardboard pinned to his pocket was the warning Don’t Come Back. I believed Uncle Billy. I believed then that there was gold in the mountains, and the young man in the photograph, my Uncle Billy, would find it.
Uncle Billy was lucky this way. His pockets were always filled with big change. He bet and bought tickets; he took me to the horse races. I fainted in the stands and lost my money. Uncle Billy doubled his. “A lesson,” he said. “A lesson there for you.”
Good, of course, to have inherited money, but every man wants to make his own.
And Uncle Billy married money, too, which was another lesson, surely. Mother told me about it often enough. She recalled Aunt Frances’s train, the size of her trousseau. “Linens!” Even Nonna was impressed. Inlaid furniture and monumental jewels. Mother cried to remember a tablesetting: Christofle silver, Baccarat crystal, Herend’s Queens Bird five-piece plate setting. “I know the names.” Antique candlesticks, silver pheasants.
“Then why did she steal my clothes?” Mother wanted to know.
“You left them behind; she didn’t think you would mind. She gave them to the high school drama club.”
Mother said, “If I could only smoke one of your funny cigarettes, but I’m dying here as it is.”
She said, “You could have lived with me after I left the San.”
I reminded her of a visit to Aunt Frances’s when Mother came in loudly, unannounced, and tore off the wig she was wearing and exposed her small head. Her own hair was scant, a scraped-back color, a slightness like the rest of those parts she covered up, painted on, glued over. (My father’s fault! His terrible driving!) Mother was crying then, saying, “What’s this crap I can’t take care of my daughter?” In the end, I was glad she lost out to Uncle Billy and Aunt Frances; in the end, I was glad to live away from her. I did not want to be different. And I liked some parts of school. I liked Mr. Early.
“Oh,” Mother said, “that pail full of worms.”
You never met him.”
“Your nonna said.”
“But Nonna wasn’t talking!”
Nonna again. It often came back to Nonna. “If my mother were really dead,” Mother said, “I would know it.”
Mother, sitting on the toilet lid putting on sock-slippers, was talking about what she most often talked about, saying, “It’s Nonna. I know the voice. She’s telling me that I wasn’t Daddy’s favorite. She’s telling me what I already know, but Nonna is still jealous of me no matter what she says.”
Mother said, “It must have been hurtful to Billy that you got the pearls. And the diamond ring was supposed to be mine.”
Mother, wobbling at the sink and flossing, spoke brokenly about Florida and what it would have meant if we had found a way to get there. “Your father and I would still be married!” Mother said. “If it weren’t for them.” My family, my family, the viscous slick of Mother’s family gunking up the day, following her, asking, why can’t your husband, why can’t you? Mother said, “In my family — colds, flu, measles — that’s all. No one ever got sick. Unstable was the word the family used to describe him. Poor Jack! They said to my mother: you need, he can’t, why don’t you.
Mother, using her teeth to open the aspirin, drinking water from the toothbrush glass, swallowing — close, fleshy, human — said, “I didn’t want to be different either. I just was.”
Mother said, “I was in the Garden Club for a while.”
Mother, in bed, said, “Look at me! I’m under the covers before the birdies have said goodnight.”
And so she was! But who cared? We were under the covers together in the warm dark when she talked to me about sunning herself in that aluminum coffin, the sunbed, called Florida. “I named it,” Mother said. She was the one who used it to sleep in endless off-seasons. She was out-of-doors at noon, high sun — had to be — or she would never get any color. She sunned her face and stayed in snow clothes.