MOTHER
ONCE IN A SNOW drift packed by plows come down my street, I made a snow car and sat in it for hours. Then I never went to school, or if I did, I forgot where I went and what I did there. My mother was my school and my distraction — the way she answered the door or did not answer the door but sat with just her legs crossed over the arms of the chair, and whatever she was wearing and the color or lack of color she had on her mouth and the voice she was using, such things changed every day, and I was met by someone new, sometimes with new company so instantly adoring. “Do you know how lucky you are to have such a mother?” they all of them said, and I knew what Mother had been doing — giving away again, performing. In an afternoon the boxes piled by the door with Mother saying, “And this, too, really,” then helping put on, talking as she did so, buttoning the new friend, “Yes, yes,” saying, “yes, this is you. You must take it,” giving away my father’s clothes and her clothes and my clothes — some favorites that still fit.
Mother’s hands were uncared for, carelessly used. She had tried to get through winter with one glove.
Arthur said, “When she was unhappy …,” but I knew, I knew, I knew what she did. My mother broke her body against the weather and overused the Florida Arthur had made, the foil-lined box where she lay winter-sunning herself sick.
Mother wasn’t always in her Florida box. One spring she straddled a chaise on the sunporch off her bedroom decorating straw bags with miniature fruits and flowers. Picnic-lidded, ordinary bags she turned into stories with dollhouse trinkets. Marion Van Hueval, Goldie Fleiss, Barbara Trapp, the Willis sisters, Mr. Horner for his wife, and all the girls in the Chester family ordered one of Mother’s bags. “Your nonna says it’s cheap to sell what I am doing.”
My mother, I thought, was an artist and could stack whatever was at hand to make a fluffed diversion. Once Mother emptied the pantry of fruits about to spoil and twisted them in greenery to decorate the Christmas mantle. Another year was a pink-flocked fir dressed in silver; the next, unflocked, done up in tartans and candy. Uncle Billy, Aunt Frances, Nonna, and her ancient cousins — whoever it was at whatever holiday party — waited to see what my mother would bring because always, always, she surprised them.
“Oh, Alice!” they said, protesting her extravagance but pleased to wear what she had bought them.
At the end, just before Mother and I were parted, the game was to follow her up the stairs when she was moving very fast and dragging behind her the falling-leaves coat in falling-leaf colors. Mother was dragging the coat up the stairs and saying, “Hurry. Before Arthur gets here, we can hide.” The attic, the wood bin, her foil-lined Florida, places occurred to me. Hide, then, but where and why from Arthur who expected us? I didn’t want to leave my mother, but I knew I had to leave her.
Mother had said into the phone, “I understand. We’re packed.” Mother had spoken to Uncle Billy although it was Arthur who came, who knocked on the door, who rang and called in, “Miss Alice?” We were at the foot of Mother’s unmade bed and listening to Arthur calling Mother gently, “Miss Alice? Miss Alice, the car’s outside warm.”
From the start I believed what Uncle Billy always told me, “Your mother only needs a rest.” But what home would there be for her to come home to, I wondered, and I kicked at the FOR SALE sign in the snow.
First I went to Uncle Billy’s house on the frozen lake, then the desert, Uncle Billy’s on the frozen lake again, in-between at Arlette’s, Arthur’s some afternoons, then Nonna’s for a long time.
“I get thirsty,” I explained to Aunt Frances, to Arlette, to Uncle Billy that time in the desert. “I won’t spill.”
But I spilled things that stained. I made a mess, a small disaster. I caused more than one woman to cry, “How could you! How could you when I asked you not to?”
Most often I was showing off, like that time I took the boy’s tire to ride in on the river when Arlette had said, “No riding in tires! I don’t care how good you can swim!” Arlette had warned me when suddenly I was spinning down the river. The tire valve was sharp against my back, but I didn’t care except to sit up higher, so that I could wave from the tire and not be seen as I felt I must be seen: a girl no one knew, a visitor falling through the hole of the tire — stupid, stupid! I was saved, of course; I did not become what I had hoped I might become. No streamy thing carried forward over cataracts, no mystery. I stayed a shapeless, wicked girl, clumsy, shy, easily embarrassed. I lived on and on, and I sometimes heard Arlette’s story of the day I nearly drowned.
Blah, blah, blah, Arlette was such a big talker.
May I? Do you mind? Do you mind if I? Could I? I was asking for something of everyone all the time.
I once spent an afternoon and an evening with a veiled crone — my father’s mother? — who lived on a pond in a bog of green sound: croaking frogs and crickets and brittle insects that broke like twigs. The doves made the most familiar music, and I was pacified to hear it and to see the birds so stilly perched. Yet they were common birds. The doves cooed unregarded, I thought, so I paid close attention to the doves; I made a point of looking at them. I believed then that any gesture I made was felt; I believed I could make the unhappy happy just by my attentions.
“I think you’re pretty,” I said with my fist around the money of a compliment, but the veiled crone asked, “Who taught you to lie like that?”
MOTHER
IN A PHOTOGRAPH I still can’t find, I am wearing Mother’s pin-wheel dress, so called because it twirled, and I am in mid-twirl in this dress and oversized sunglasses and high, high heels. My mouth is closed to hide my braces. I sent a copy of the picture, the only one I liked of me, to Mother. Later I sent others, but none as good; yet Mother didn’t even like the pin-wheel picture. She wrote, Your face looks like a pail of worms. Nevertheless, I went on wearing Mother’s clothes: the carumba! skirt and the Saint-Joan velvet, the bird hat, the Colbert glasses, all the quirky accessories, the dresses with names. Handmade one-of-a-kind was what Mother had left, unusual clothes worn unusual ways: sweaters inside-out and no adornment but a mouth.
More and more that was how Mother had worn her face — all mouth.
And I was all mouth — a big mouth, fat teeth, braces. A gabber, a blabber, a gossip. At ten, eleven, twelve, even older, I wanted everyone to know my story — to know it sharply, as one who rings the wounded might, with me, at the center, reciting: My father is dead, and I am only waiting for my mother to be well enough to take me away from these houses chapped by winter. Cold in Uncle Billy’s house, and I was rarely left to wander. “Read,” Aunt Frances said, or “Practice the piano, but softly.” I could scrutinize Uncle Billy’s collections, the glass cases of sprung-winged bugs, displays of shells, black and blue stones from isolate beaches — from Mother’s beach, perhaps, or wherever it was she was. The picture-postcards she sent were of bullfights, clock towers, sprigs of orange blossom. Mother was writing to me as I would to Arthur, remarking on the splendid weather, asking, “Don’t you have a decent picture of yourself?”
MOTHER
MOTHER KEPT THE PHOTO albums and gave Arthur the stereo. The silver was for me though there were pieces missing — asparagus tongs, toast holders, candlesnuffs, and coasters. The paintings, well, the paintings, the paintings she didn’t know. She hadn’t decided.