The three women I knew who killed themselves were all grandmothers.
The first, a ketchup heiress who lived in a yellow mansion with a wraparound porch. On warm nights her grandchildren slept outside in hammocks.
The second, a middle school Spanish teacher. She ate homemade granola for breakfast, coiled a braid around her head, fell in love late in life, and married in the entryway of her barn. She was bustling and red cheeked, always dancing.
And Ruth, with her lipstick and elegant tapered fingers and the scars on her knees, who walked into the water.
I stayed at home and lay in bed in the room above my parents’ garage, waiting for my stomach to grow. It didn’t for the longest time, and then it was enormous.
My center of gravity changed every day, and I fell on the way to the post office. My mom dressed my bloody knee.
All winter I lay on my back and watched the dead spider with her egg sack and her scrap of web blowing between the panes in the storm window, and in the spring her front legs began to squirm and my two gentle girls were born.
Changeling
I rode the bus away from Gray. He thought I was going on a trip, but I knew I was beginning the long-drawn-out sorrow of leaving him, even though I’d send postcards from Boston and return to him in a week, slipping my hand into his jeans pocket on the ride home from the bus stop, his face so startlingly sweet and shaved for my return, the familiar smell of his neck lulling me into the first sleep I’d had in days.
There was a woman on the bus with my mother’s face, humping an oversized backpack up the aisle in Augusta. I hadn’t seen my mother in nineteen years. She left us when I was four, met a new man, joined the military. I pretended not to recognize her, and she pretended not to know me, and got a seat in the back of the bus.
At the Portland bus stop the bus driver lumbered up the aisle, counting passengers for reboarding to ensure no one snuck on unticketed. The numbers were off. I handed over my receipt from my coat pocket, where I’d fingered its edges until they were soft and blue tinged with smudged ink.
The problem passenger, of course, was the woman who might be my mother. Her voice was deep and gravelly as the bus driver questioned her, her mumbled answers lost in the commotion of the bus. She didn’t have my mom’s voice, as I remembered it. Mom’s bright singing had won her blue-colored shots at karaoke. Like Tammy Wynette.
I watched the woman with my mother’s face and watched everyone else watching her. She wore an orange hunting cap. Her hair was blonde and thin. She had the haircut of a teenage boy who insists on keeping his hair long and trimming it himself, limp curls cropped unevenly above her shoulders. She wore an army jacket. It was not the handsome, brass-buttoned suit in the portrait she’d sent me from her military days. She wore army pants too, green, wool maybe, that hung low on her hips, which were as narrow as a boy’s. She had the same ruddy, unwrinkled skin as my mother, though she was a good twenty pounds lighter, her hair a few shades darker. They shared a bone structure — pointed chin, prominent cheekbones. She covered her teeth when she smiled sorrowfully at the bus driver, just like my mother had done. Mom’s teeth came in crooked and stained, and my teeth grew the same. I was raised in the time of fluoride and orthodontics, but I had her bad genes, drank well water, couldn’t afford braces. All my friends had straight white smiles. It’s unsettling — a beautiful young woman with a smile like a witch.
I was convinced the mother-stranger riffling through her pockets for her ticket was once beautiful. Why else be ashamed of that smile? It suited the rest of her now, but she hid it from habit. Mom once had the trappings of beauty in a replicable way — fake nails, bleach blonde hair, thick makeup. Fresh from the shower she looked frightened and alien, her face like an underdeveloped Polaroid.
She moved on to tearing apart her backpack, an enormous, camo-patterned thing with a frame, and still she couldn’t come up with the receipt, so she began unpacking carefully folded undershirts, underpants, and balls of yellow socks, stacking them in the center isle. It was winter, and the aisle was gritty, and wet with slush. Two plastic bags, one full of sandwiches, one full of orange peels. A handful of tissues. One of the sock balls rolled away from her, disappearing under the seats.
“That’s it,” she said, raising her voice, “that and feminine stuff, which stays in the bag. I bought a ticket, in Bangor, like I told you. You don’t remember me? Not one of you remembers?” And then she was talking at all of us, and we stopped watching her and pretended to be occupied with our magazines or the view of the parking lot. “You, sir,” she said, pointing. “I sat right there in front of you. Tell the driver.” But the man said nothing.
I raised my hand. “I saw her,” I said.
“Well, why the heck didn’t you say so earlier?” she asked. “But thank you. Thank you, sweetheart.”
Now that she was one of us again, a lady leaned over in her seat to help her collect her clothes from the aisle.
“I need some air, sir,” the woman said.
“Ma’am, we’re behind schedule as is,” said the bus driver, wheezing his way back to his seat, cheeks pinked.
“Listen now, everyone else on this bus got to get off and breathe a sec while I was fussing with you. I need to stretch my legs.” So the doors thwacked open, and the cold air came pouring in, and he left the doors open like he was proving something while she paced the parking lot, throwing punches, stretching like a boxer. When she lifted her arms over her head I glimpsed her stomach, bisected by a scar.
“I’m sitting with the nice one,” she said when she reboarded. I moved my purse from the seat beside me. I couldn’t possibly look at her face this close up. She smelled both animal and floral.
“Here,” she said. “Have some nice potpourri, homemade by my ma.” What I thought were orange peels were orange rose petals, stuffed in a sandwich bag. She crushed the bag against my chest and I thanked her, dreading the thought of her smell leaching into my things.
It was three o’clock, but nearly dark outside, and the bus headlights sparkled against the ice-encased birches. Whole swaths of trees were bowed down with the weight of the ice, like a forest in the wake of a nuclear blast.
“Little of this too?” she said, reaching into her long, deep pocket, pulling out a fifth of Coffee Brandy. I was already tipsy. Gray took me to Ruby Tuesday’s before the bus stop. He bought me two coral-colored drinks to celebrate my trip, peach schnapps something with fruit bits floating in it. I was afraid the bus driver would catch us and kick us both off the bus, but I was even more afraid of her. I took the bottle in the darkness, toasted to my mother, and drank.
Mom used to park the car in the driveway and drink. Watching the house, watching me jump on the trampoline. When she drove away and didn’t come back Dad ripped off all his clothes and went running naked through the woods, branches cutting him up. After that he joined a Christian cult where the men wore bowler hats and the women wore dresses made from curtains and listening to the radio was forbidden. He told me I was a sinner, and I moved in with my grandfather. I played the radio all night under my covers.
I used to see Mom everywhere, blonde hair swishing through crowds away from me. She sent me postcards from Tallahassee and Honolulu, from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. All they said was “I love you.” One day the postcards stopped. The military had discharged her for bad conduct. She just disappeared. At the playground behind my house I crawled into strange women’s laps, snuck into their brood of children, slipped my hand, unnoticed, into theirs. I can remember how the startled mothers’ expressions rearranged when they discovered it was my hand they held — a look of pity mixed, consistently, with repulsion. No one wants a changeling.