“It’s not far. We could walk,” he said.
“I’ll have to leave these behind then.” She tossed Gena’s shoes into the bushes by the door. “They’ve shredded my skin.”
The dress could not have been Gena’s. It was the exact shape of his mother. She walked, as she always did, a little ahead of him, her upper body tipped into an imaginary wind. The morning was overcast but warm, and the plants and trees had resumed their exotic, unmenacing aspects. The picnic basket swung on her arm like something from a fairy tale. He offered to take it but she shook her head. It was very light, she told him.
Soon this road would be his road, this sky his sky. He thought he should buy a notebook and write some of it down. Up ahead a car with surfboards strapped to the top pulled into a driveway and honked, then honked again. A kid in a red wet suit — the body was pressed so flat he couldn’t tell if it was male or female — came out, shoved another board on top of the pile, and got in back.
The ocean was a softer shade of blue today beneath the clouds. His mother cut straight through the tall sharp grass to the edge of the cliff. Her hair and her dress blew in the same direction. She stood there for several minutes and if he didn’t know better he would have said she was praying.
The path down was so steep you didn’t really have to take steps; you just slid on your heels through the sand. The cliff seemed far larger from down here. Peter bent his head up the enormous rock face to where his mother had just been standing. It was probably sixty feet high. They were protected from the wind down here, and the clouds had begun to burn off.
His mother chose a spot on the dry sand a few feet up from the tide line. They sat and did not speak. Waves broke in great thuds and splatters against the rocks, and the foamy water rushed through the narrow passages to shore, then jerked back into the pull of the next wave. Peter was hungry but his mother had tucked the basket up in her lap, stretched her arms through the handles and around its sides so that it was now part of her belly. She was looking at her toes, or maybe a few inches beyond them. He’d never seen her sit still before, without a book or a stack of essays, without some purpose. When she raised her face to his, it was as if she’d pulled back the air itself, like a curtain he’d never known was moveable.
“Here,” she said, unthreading her arms and hoisting the basket off of her. “Open it.”
He raised the lid. On the top, beside two bananas, was a charcoal drawing of a man. It was elaborate, with shading in the cheeks and around the eyes, the cross-hatching Miss Conley was always trying to teach them.
“I thought I owed you a better likeness.”
He recognized him. Even from the hasty sketch he’d demanded of her so long ago he recognized him. The thin hair, parted on the right, the small eyes, the uncertain mouth. It was an angry face, but whose anger was it, his father’s or his mother’s? He could hear his mother breathing unevenly through her nose. He figured he had one question, maybe two. What was most important? He knew he should ask the man’s name, but something stopped him. It was both too little and too much. He held the drawing out to her — he didn’t want those narrow eyes watching him anymore — but she flinched back and would not take it. He couldn’t think of the words for what he wanted. Not another fucking drawing. He crumpled the paper and tossed it at the sea. It landed in the wet sand. Within seconds he regretted it and wanted to get up and grab the picture in case the water came up and carried it away, but it remained stubbornly in place. He heard her breathing and knew that he didn’t have much time. One question maybe two, right now or never again.
“Tell me.” It barely belonged to him, this voice from the clenched depth of his stomach.
She recoiled, pulling up her legs and wrapping the yellow dress over them. She rested her chin in the dip of fabric between the knobs of her knees.
“Tell me who he was and why you married him and where he is now.”
“We were never married.”
He waited for her to go on but she didn’t. He felt like shoving her right over into the sand. “Tell me.”
“I lived with my mother then.” Her voice was so faint he had to lean toward her, but imperceptibly; too much interest and he’d scare the words away. “She was a …” A wave smothered the rest.
“I can’t hear you!” he yelled into the sudden hush of the water peeling back.
She didn’t react to the shrillness of his voice the way she normally would. She just pushed the basket away with her feet and slid herself closer to him. She did this not with her usual teacherlike alacrity but with the creepy deliberateness of an old person. “My mother was a true matriarch. She was that imperious blend of insecurity and strength that Faulkner and Lawrence capture—”
“I don’t care about Faulkner and Lawrence right now, Ma.”
She nodded and pursed her lips and he figured he’d lost her. He’d gone too far. What was wrong with him? Why was he behaving like this when he was so close to getting some answers? But she started speaking again. “I lived with my mother and liked to spend as little time around her as possible so I often stayed in my classroom until evening, doing my work.”
“Where was this?” He regretted his own interruption immediately.
“Solano, Texas. It’s a small town about a hundred and fifty miles from the Mexican border. My father had bought a cattle ranch there, but the land was better for spinach and sorghum. We were there for a year, then my father died. We stayed because my father couldn’t push us on to the next place anymore. I went to a two-year college, then started teaching at the school there. My mother converted the whole ranch to sorghum and finally started making some money.”
What the hell was sorghum? He didn’t know and he didn’t care, and he held his tongue this time.
“There was one afternoon at school. Normally other teachers were around.” She curled and uncurled the hem of her dress and the thin cloth quivered in her fingers. “But everyone had gone across the street to the football, an important game, division something or other. The whole county had turned out for it. I could hear the roaring at my desk. I was planning to catch the second half, after I finished my grading. I had a few students on the team and I’d promised to show up. Everyone was gone. Even the construction workers — the schoolhouse was being renovated that fall — had permission to watch the game. There was one of them I had a terrific crush on. He used to visit me in the afternoons. He was too shy to get close to my desk so he’d circle the edges of the classroom, examining whatever was up on the walls, asking ‘Who’s Menalaeus?’ or ‘What’s synecdoche?’ He was so curious. His name was Eric. He always reminded me of Levin, that wonderful scene when he takes Kitty mushroom picking and—”
“Is Eric my father?”
“No.” She shook her head, which she’d tucked down into her neck like a goose. “Eric went to the game. I did my work, gathered my papers, and stopped in the bathroom on the way out.” She was talking with her eyes shut now. Peter could see the raised pupils jerking from side to side beneath their lids. “I was at the sink, washing my hands.” She stopped there, and he waited. He didn’t ask why she was talking about washing her hands when he wanted to know about his father. He took a deep breath. A pale-eyed dog trotted past them on his way to the water, two halves of a coconut shell wedged loosely in his mouth. “Sometimes it helps to think of Leda and the Swan.” She was whispering now. “To think of Io, Persephone, and Europa.”
Maybe there was a part of him, a cluster of cells somewhere in his small brain that knew, that was trying to tell the other parts that would not listen, but he needed her to say it, not in code, not in references to people that were only real to her. He didn’t need this shit. This was the shit he’d gotten all his life. Leda and the fucking Swan.