“This was where your father came from,” Arthur said, and I was amazed. My father, the mysteriously dead and only ever whispered about — Arthur knew where Father came from.
I said, “You’ve been here from the beginning.”
On the occasions when Uncle Billy did the driving, we blurred past the countryside at speeds I wouldn’t look at with the numbers grown larger, long and skinny, wavery as numbers were supposed to be in dreams.
Uncle Billy said, “I’m in a hurry. Just tell me, can you see the FOR SALE sign? Should we send Arthur to shovel?” Uncle Billy asked me, but he answered himself. He said, “Yes, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll get Arthur onto it.”
Arthur found my mother’s missing glove in the shoveling. He used the sharp edge of the shovel on the ice to get it out, her glove — one of the last parts left of what had happened to Mother at her own house.
Mother wrote back from her Florida, “So you remembered making a snow car! I’m sorry I didn’t see it. Do you remember how we used to dance to the Spanish music?”
I remembered more than that. That was the winter Mother never left the house but waved at me from windows to come in. “Come in, please! Come in!” she called from the house, the one I put my mouth to. Lip-prints or breath against the mirrors and windows, in such ways I could taste myself and the loose-earth taste of the house. We conversed lovingly, the house and I. Everything was in its place and sensate and easily hurt. The front stairs often felt neglected, and the basement knew itself as ugly. “Whatever was empty or kicked or slammed shut wept. I heard my father’s closet mumbling.
I knew this house. I was there for the bird that flew in and scraped itself against the ceiling in its wild, bloody flight. “Get out! Get out! Get out, you fool!” Mother was crying, but the bird slammed against the wall and died.
I pointed out to Arthur where near the trees it had happened: Mother broke her nose and bled; but Arthur said what I saw was shadow. He said what I saw was leeched from fallen leaves, pinking snow. What I saw, he insisted, wasn’t blood.
“Your mother,” Arthur said, “was excited to go. She knew it was time to get better, and she urged me to drive fast.” Arthur laughed at himself, saying, “She didn’t really like to drive with me. Your mother said I was too slow, and I am. I have always minded the speed limits, but your mother likes to go faster.”
“I am just the opposite of her,” I said, almost shouting it over Arthur’s chipping at the ice with the shovel. So much noise for a long time — chalk-marks when he hit the sidewalk — my worried ears grew hot.
TUCSON
“WE NEVER TALKED VERY much, Arthur and I, but I was in the habit of kissing him good-bye, and I was twelve. My mother had always encouraged me to be affectionate and kiss — kiss friends, boyfriends, courtesy aunts, so that in the car, alone together, I kissed Arthur good-bye despite his ugliness, and I believed, and Mother must have believed, too, that such gestures made others happy, and sometimes I got carried away and kissed Arthur many times. Everyone likes to be kissed was Mother’s motto, and so I kissed him — eyebrow, forehead, nose — I kissed until Aunt Frances scolded I was too old to kiss the help like that.
But how old was I? Mother wrote she had lost track; sometimes I was two, other times I sounded forty.
“I am almost thirteen!” was what I said.
“Too old to wear braids,” Aunt Frances said. “We should cut your hair,” and she stood me in a tub and slopped a drape around my shoulders and cut me very short. She said, “If you hadn’t moved!”
Uncle Billy said, “It’s perfect for the desert,” and it was. It was easy swimmer’s hair I was wearing when I was swimming in Uncle Billy’s pool. On any desert spring night I liked to swim in the bath-warm pool, steam fogging the air where the light from the kitchen showed through. I could see them in the window, Uncle Billy and his wife passing, turned away from me. They must have thought by now I was in bed, but I was too old for such a bedtime. I liked to swim at night with not so much on as what even Mother had sent me — that stupid bikini! But now not a strap, not a bit of bandanna, I was just a body root-white in water and moving in a madcap dance, scissoring to get away from whatever danger I imagined, from kidnap or murder — but quietly moving, quietly. I did ballet: I stood on my hands and held my legs together straight for as long as I could.
“Are you watching?” Everyone asked this question of everyone else in the family.
I was swimming in my Uncle Billy’s pool at night while the people in charge were crossing overhead. In the daytime, sometimes watched, I heard them say to me, “That’s enough, Alice”—Alice, my name, after Mother—“that’s enough in the pool, Alice. It’s time to get out.”
“Why?” I said, “I don’t need anyone to watch me.”
Uncle Billy was about to leave. He was wearing his cowboy shirt with the pearl snap-buttons and khaki shorts and worn-out two-toned shoes — he was dressed to find the Dutchman’s mine in the Superstition Mountains. The jeep he drove was sufficiently supplied to prospect.
Uncle Billy asked, “Remember what I said, Alice?” He asked, “Don’t you want a treat when I come back? Can you be good?”
“But why do I?” I asked.
“Because you do,” Aunt Frances said, and she was giving other orders, too; she was directing the help, the nameless unreliables hired for the desert vacation. She was licking S&H stamps for gifts. She was washing the dust out of everyone’s socks herself! — rubbing the socks with a stone and saying, “Watch how you can make yourself useful, Alice.”
Aunt Frances spoke of money, of Uncle Billy’s, Nonna’s, and her own, but not my mother’s; what was left of my mother’s was knotted in trusts and Nonna was paying for me — didn’t I know that? Aunt Frances said, and said often, “Didn’t your mother teach you?” Simple economies and healthful ways. There were rules, manners. Made beds and sailing spoons. “Napkins first and last,” she said, “and the napkin ring is yours,” and so it was, handwrought and hammered, a gothic napkin ring with my mother’s name, which was also mine, Alice.
Alice, Alice, Alice, Alice!
“People who have spent their share of the family money are impossible,” Aunt Frances said, and I guessed she meant my mother.
Others had often said to Mother, “Where does it go, honey?” But Arthur defended her. “Your mother is generous,” he said. “She gives things away,” and then he told me again about the stereo, the Magnavox, that speakered coffin with pencil legs, the box with shifting sound. He told how, at the end, before she went away, Mother had given it to him, had said, “Arthur, I can see you want this. I can tell from the way you pet the lid, you want this thing.”
Arthur said, “I didn’t have any records or even a place to put it.” Like me, I thought, he wanted to see the long-playing records drop; he wanted to fall asleep to music. He said, “I don’t play music in the car because I don’t want to forget what I am doing. But the Magnavox is home-music at night. The Magnavox is different.”
I told Arthur that if the Magnavox had been mine to give, I would have given it to him. I said, “I would have.”
I would not have done the same for anyone else, certainly not the desert help Aunt Frances hired, the nameless unreliables who passed spring vacation talking to me, complaining. They said they saw me as a fellow-sufferer; they said they had seen me swimming at night. Was I as unhappy? they wanted to know; and they told me about the troubles they had had — and were having — they told me about the troubles with Aunt Frances especially. They asked, “How can you stand it?”