“I’m going to want them someday,” was what she had said.
In the end Mother left behind a lot of clothes; and Aunt Frances donated the best of them to school. The famous bird hat, several wigs, the shoes some Rick had bought her — fantastical — I saw them again in school plays. I saw the hat, and a boy I had a crush on wore the hair. Aunt Frances had said, “Your mother won’t see many parties where she is,” and Uncle Billy had agreed. Aunt Frances and Uncle Billy had always spoken in agreement on Mother. Sunday phone calls, for instance. Remember? “Are they doing you any good?” Aunt Frances asking, and Uncle Billy asking, too. “Do you think it’s helpful your mother hears you cry?”
“No,” was how I answered.
“Then why?”
I shrugged. I couldn’t always believe myself how much I missed my mother, but I did. It was tiring to be a guest, yet I was fearful to admit how I felt and kept saying, thank you, instead. I wanted to be agreeable. I wanted new clothes and I was often happy and happily dressed in cochina slippers and ruffled skirts. So what was there to cry about really—really? listened to the way Aunt Frances said, “How quiet it is now!” and I knew what she meant, how the day had purpose. The pot was on the boil and beading the hood of the stove; the smell was of food just now soft. Here was comfort: Aunt Frances’s kitchen. Here no food went bad but was fed to those masked scavengers, those silly raccoons. Uncle Billy put out scraps, and at his June party a bowl of champagne.
“What for?” Aunt Frances asked.
“Oh, just to see what might happen.”
On the night of Uncle Billy’s June party, the summer I was twelve and went away to camp, Uncle Billy said Mother might come home and might just want me back. What did I think about that?
I thought about how Mother would arrive — driving too fast and slamming the car door in a dust though the driveway was paved.
I thought about the speed of life with Mother and how, despite the uncertainty, the noise, the mess, the shame, her company was as big as the movies, and I missed her.
I was afraid, too. Here was often hard, but did I want wherever home would be with Mother?
The air then was coppery with music and from as far away as the far field where Arthur was parking cars, I could hear Uncle Billy’s June party.
Oh, let’s just steal this car and drive on! what I wanted to say to Arthur.
Sometimes the dream was: I steal the car with Mother. She is well, steady, the kind of woman she can be — has been, was on occasion — the kind who says, “This is how we get there”; and she gets us there; and we have not been long on the road. The mother, who is the mother I account my favorite person, has packed enough to drink so no one goes thirsty. In some dreams there is a lap robe — cashmere, which made sense — cashmere: It was all my mother wore in sweaters, also cashmere mittens, tams, scarves. “Hand it over now, dear, I’m freezing. But you like it?” Mother asked. “So wear it. You can have it. It looks better on you.” Such exchange as this was real; I didn’t dream it; I had heard it from Mother a lot of the time. Mother could be lavish, yet I told Arthur that she was not — no, never really had been giving.
“She was always thankful to me. Thankful for a nail. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Arthur. She cried over the suntan box I made her.”
Florida, where was it, I wondered, but nobody knew.
Some of Mother’s clothes I had seen. The staircase skirt, for instance, floor-length and swishy, the staircase skirt was used in lots of school plays with difficult women in them given to long, hurtful speeches. These women had trembling sensibilities; these women gripped handkerchiefs and vials and knives. They were dangerous and vacant. Their exorbitance drove the play. I know that woman was what I said when I first saw such a woman.
In life Mother had wept to leave me and she raised a bandaged arm to wave good-bye.
ARLETTE’S STORIES
“YOUR MOMMA HAD ONE of them wiener dogs,” Arlette said, “black, slick as a bean, yappy and scaredy — a little mean. His name was Bobbie, but your nonna called him Boobly — he was that stupid, still your daddy had bought him — so. So one day your momma forgets to close that fence Arthur put around the house, and Boobly takes off and into the neighbor’s yard and kills a momma cat and all her little kitties. That dog! He used to eat his own poo and you’d kiss him!”
MOTHER
“CAN I STAY WITH you?” was what I asked Arthur when I got to Uncle Billy’s house, and Arthur said no.
Arthur said, “It’s Uncle Billy’s.”
And the next night and the next night until I lost count of the nights I spent there in the house full of complete collections, sets and settings, hammered silver Christmas spoons and Dedham plates and books: a no-touch house. “Only look,” Aunt Frances said, and I looked.
“The dust!” Arlette cried, and my Aunt Frances cried, too, both of them with rags they slapped at books, yet Uncle Billy brought home more — more books, more figurines with china collars made to look like lace and sharp to touch.
“Don’t!” the women warned, unwrapping plates smeary with newsprint and cold from sitting in the trunk. Rhine wines, cordials, flute champagnes. Arthur was carrying in more boxes; they popped when slit open and exhaled. The women were unwrapping Mother’s house. That is what I saw on the table, plates I had eaten from. I knew the knife marks, the slashes made by Mother with her arms around my neck and cutting up my food from behind.
“More?” someone was asking in an astonished voice — more of just about anything anyone could think on shoes, salt-shakers, candlesnuffs.
Uncle Billy was promising more if I promised to be good, more souvenirs from wherever he was going if the requests he made were met. The requests he made were not too many: Use Kleenex, don’t snuffle; stop picking at your thumbs. Until I am back or while I am away was how Uncle Billy started. “I want you to be good.” His wife and Arlette and Arthur — all the help — heard him say, “I want you to be good, Alice. Do you hear me? Alice?”
I didn’t.
As soon as Uncle Billy was gone, Aunt Frances caught me at the cupboards, fining my thumb in Mother’s thumb-cut crystal glasses. “Snooping!” she said. “Your mother liked to snoop, too. Did you know that? Next time, ask.”
I was twelve when I swore I would never be like Mother although privately I still missed her very much. Once, I asked Arthur to drive me again to where she was, drive me in the jewel, my Uncle Billy’s car, that was emerald at night and took the light richly. Under the streetlights we were driving, under the downtown lights and the grayer, sidestreet lights; we drove through small-town darkness; and we were safe until we stopped at the town’s end, and I asked, “Would you? Would you take me again to the San? I’m not sure who I remember.”
Straight ahead was unused country.
Turned around we could also pass my street again and the entrance to school, but we were already late, and Arthur said, “I don’t want your Uncle Billy to worry.”
Arthur was a slave, I thought, with a slave’s point of view; but he said finally, “All right then, I’ll show you something.”
All ways were dark, but this way deeply. We only knew what things were as we passed them, dark stands of trees, rows of mailboxes, wooden markers, the start of hills — up, over, over and down — down a narrow, brambled road, as in a story, abruptly turning and traveling upwards again to a gawky house with finials, deep porches, churchy windows. Here was a spinster closed for winter. I couldn’t see inside although I tried.