“But, Christine, I did,” my father would say, nearly inaudibly. It seemed to me that he suffered from my mother’s discomfort more than she did. To my father, I think, m\ mother’s problem of dressing was a symbol of all her suffering, and because of this he could hardly bear to witness these lapses in judgment.
“Why must she suffer so much?” he wondered day after endless day, night after sleepless night, as she typed. It moved him terribly to see my mother in the middle of January in a thin cotton blouse and cardigan sweater. He seemed wounded by it.
But I thought it was a good sign, a reassuring sign when mother knew she was dressed improperly. What I feared more than anything in the world was when she felt no weather at all — no cold, no heat, no rain — when she would walk through a rainstorm, come back drenched, and sit down to work at her typewriter, without changing her clothes or even wiping her brow; when she came in from a walk in the snow in her sandals, her feet bright red and numb, and she, completely unaware of them When she felt no weather, when weather did not matter, I knew it would not be long before the doctors would come and she would not be allowed out of bed. And so these days of complaining, of discomfort, of my mother questioning my father and Hetcher and me eased me in a strange way.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this terrible heat?” she would ask again and again, taking off a sweater, cocking her head and squinting slightly as if to say, “If you told me, then why can’t I remember?”
Her mind could not be trusted completely. It stopped, it skipped, it added, it forgot. It changed things.
“I did tell you, sweetheart,” my father whispered into her ear. He held her in his strong arms. She would not go mad, he said to himself. She would not.
A simple thing like dressing for the weather might have made mv mother feel more at home here, day to day, had she only somehow known how to listen to such things. She knew, though, that she only had so much energy and, considering the demanding nature of her mind, she could not afford to pay attention to everything, every conversation, every news broadcast. She knew how easily she tired. If she allowed herself to see and hear everything, she would not have survived, for everything to her was a challenge, imperfect, asking to be transformed, rearranged, made over. But she would not allow it; above all my mother was a survivor.
The simple task of just looking at the world was problematic; just going to the grocery store or meeting a new friend of mine wore her out. “Sonia,” she’d say, looking at my new dark-eyed classmate. “Sonia,” she’d say, and, if she let it, her mind could wander around that one name for an entire afternoon.
She had to learn, and she did learn, when to look away. Not to would have meant to burn up, to be dissipated — or to go crazy. She would not go crazy, she said to herself. Psychic energy had to be preserved, carefully doled out, used for her work. Emotions had to be hoarded for the work. Attention to detail, mental acuity had to be saved, then focused. Select, my mother must have told herself, select and choose. Careful — be careful. Go slowly. I think I understood. She would survive; the weather was just one of the many things she had to put aside.
“Quiet,” my father said over and over through the years I was growing up. “Your mother needs quiet to work.” It was the only thing he ever asked of us. “Quiet,” he whispered, retreating into his soundproof room where his music played.
You tell me to think of the white at the end of the day on the stock market floor.
I like the way you put me to sleep.
I think of monuments. You whisper the names I want to hear:
Rachmaninoff
Shostakovich
Rimsky-Korsakov
Rach ma ni noff
Sho sta ko vich
Rim sky — Kor sa kov.
Looking up from our tangle of cat’s cradle, I noticed that Sonia’s brown eyes had turned the pale color of tea. The yellow flowers on the wallpaper in my bedroom were beginning to disappear as if they were being eaten off in some exquisite hunger. In the next room my father’s bare feet blanched. The world was losing its color. Walking to the window, I noticed a few leaves on the backyard tree had shed their green, not for the brilliant, momentary oranges and reds of autumn but for some lesser shade, a sort of gray, the mark of a more troubled, internal season, more permanent than other seasons, colder.
This was only the beginning. In the days to come, the world would continue to empty itself slowly of color until finally, by the time my mother was handing her suitcase to my father at the top of the stairs, I would barely be able to see her at all, she would be so lost in white. This happened many times through the years of my childhood. The lake would gray and flatten into a pale square. The red-winged blackbird flying across the blue sky would lose its shock of red, its feathers would fade, and the white sky would devour it.
I began to be able to detect these changes almost immediately, no matter how subtle they were at first. I felt lucky that I could foresee my mother’s departures so far in advance. With the first signs I would follow her more closely, sit nearer to her, watch her while she napped on the couch, etch her profile in my mind, hug her disappearing body as color drained from her lips and her blonde hair whitened. On these early days, her shadowy arm would curl around me like a wisp of smoke and she would whisper, “What is it, Vanessa?” But she knew well what it was.
Had I overheard telephone conversations, seen airplane or train tickets in advance, been privy to plans I had forgotten, or was it something else, something in my mother herself, some early retreat, a pulling back, a stepping away that made me aware that soon she’d be leaving again? I think I received my cue from some extreme inwardness in her, from the distant place she had already gone in preparation for her own departure, a place even beyond that place which was her normal domain. Yes, I was extremely sensitive to the timbre of my mother’s existence. I loved her so much that days in advance I could see her departure in the face of a friend.
When everything had become white, I knew the time had come for my mother to go to the closet, drag her leather suitcase across the room, and lift it to the bed. She would call me into the room then, and we would sit there for a moment staring into the white. Then she would begin.
“I just don’t know what to bring, Vanessa,” she would say. What to pack always seemed the outward struggle of a much deeper ambivalence for both of us. We sat on the bed and looked into empty space.
“Maybe I’ll pack nothing,” she said finally “Maybe I’ll give the Henrietta T. Putnam Lecture in the nude! What do you think?”
“Yes, we’ll only pack your hat,” I said.
“Perfect,” she said. “The fuchsia one with the feather.”
It is one of those moments frozen in my mind forever: the hat, tilted to the side, covers one eye. Her hair, pulled up, falls over one shoulder. She stands in her lacy underwear, puckers her lips, and then laughs hysterically, shivering almost, in anticipation of the windy lecture hall.
I would keep her with me. I would keep the sparkle in her blue eyes and put it back into the lake, back into the sky she was about to leave behind. I would keep her laugh, her intonation, her hat with the feather, her hair falling down her back — her hair was yellower in those days and longer. She must have been very young.
I remained through the years an almost-silent witness to my mother’s packing as I watched the mysterious rise and fall of hemlines on her lovely legs. I said very little, for language could only complicate the complicated feelings of my mother. She would sit back on the bed again and look at me and say, “I just don’t know what to take,” and soon she’d begin to cry in the white room. Holding her hand, I might then walk to her enormous closet with her and stand there looking at the bottoms of her dresses, and I too would begin to cry. Though I tried so hard at times, I would never be, as some children are capable of being, the grown-up my mother needed. I could not help thinking, through those years, that my friend Sonia would have been a better daughter altogether for my mother. Sonia, keeping the seasons straight and the occasion in mind, would have put together, from my mother’s huge assortment of clothing, outfits — one for each day she was to be away with a change of evening clothes for the nights. But not me. We would start by carefully picking and choosing, but by the end of the day we would have moved all the clothes from the closet onto the bed. We felt unselective. We could imagine needing just about anything. And my mother had so many clothes.