Walking across this floor, I feared disintegration, that something so terrible would come out of the dark that I would scream and scream. I had to get to her. I had to ignore the orange flames and the constant thump thump thump fear of fire, the images that recurred and went round and round, the house filled with smoke as I'd seen it when she'd set the mattress on fire and put it out herself once, and I had to get to her. Her coughing was the only sound in the house, the house rendered all the more empty by its immense black oak furniture-the table with its five bulbous legs-this grand old buffet with its thick lower carved doors and high spotted mirror.
Rosalind and I had crawled inside the buffet when we were small, amongst the china left and even a glass or two from her wedding. That was when she let us write or draw on the walls, and break everything. She wanted her children to be free. We pasted our paper dolls to the wall with glue from the five-and-dime on Canal. We had a dream world of many characters, Mary, Madene, Betry Headquarters, and later came Katrinka's favorite, Doan the Stone, over whom we laughed and laughed for the sheer tickle of the sound, but that was later.
There was no one in this memory but Mother and I. . . and she coughed in the bedroom and I came tiptoeing towards her, frightened that she might be so drunk, her head would swing and smack the wood of the door, and her eyes would swim like cow's eyes in pictures, big and dumb, and it would be ugly, but I didn't really care that much, I mean it would be worth it, if I could just reach her, and sneak into the bed beside her. I didn't mind her body, with the potbelly and the varicose veins and the sagging breasts.
She often wore nothing but her underpants and a man's shirt around the house; she liked to be free. There are things you never, never, never tell anyone.
Just ugly awful things, like that when she sat on the toilet to have a bowel movement, she kept the bathroom door wide open, and her legs wide apart and liked us to be there with her as she read, a display of pubic hair, white thighs, and Rosalind would say, "Mother, the smell, the sme ll," as this defecating went on and on, and Mother with the Reader's Digest in one hand and the cigarette in the other, our beautiful Mother of the high domed forehead and the big brown eyes would laugh at Rosalind, who wanted to bolt, and then our Mother would read us one more funny story from the magazine, and we would all laugh.
All my life I knew people had their favorite comfort modes for the working of their bowels-that all doors be locked, that no one be near; or that there be no windows to the small room; and some like her, that wanted someone to be near, someone to be talking.
Why?
I didn't care. If I could just get to her I could take any ugly sight. Never in the midst of any state had she herself seemed anything but clean and warm, her shining hair growing from a white, white scalp, through which I'd run my fingers, her skin smooth.
Perhaps the filth accumulating around her could smother her but never corrupt her.
I crept to the door of the alcove. Her bedroom, which was now mine, had only an iron bed then with a naked coiled spring beneath the striped mattress, and she would put a thin white spread over it now and then, but mostly only sheets and blankets. It seemed the normal course of life, big thick white cups for coffee, always chipped; frayed towels; shoes with holes; the green scum on our teeth, until our Father said, "Don't any of you ever brush your teeth?"
And there might be a toothbrush for a while or even two or three and even some powder with which we could brush our teeth, but then those things would fall on the floor, or get lost or go away, and on went the pace of life, covered with a thick gray cloud. In the kitchen tubs, my Mother washed by hand as our grandmother had done till she died.
Nineteen forty-seven. Nineteen forty-eight. We carried the sheets out into the yard in a big wicker basket; her hands were swollen from wringing them out. I liked to play with the washboard in the tub. We hung the sheets on the line, and I carried the end so it didn't fall in the mud, I love it, running through clean sheets.
She had said once to me right before she died, and mark, I'm jumping now ahead some seven years, she said that she had seen a strange creature in the sheets in the yard, two small black feet, she hinted of a demonic thi ng, her eyes wide. I knew she was going crazy. She'd die soon. And she did.
But this was long before I thought she could die, even though our grandmother had. At eight, I thought people came back; death hadn't struck the deep fear in me. It was she who struck the fear, perhaps, or my Father gone on his nighttime jobs, delivering telegrams on a motorbike after his regular hours at the post office, or sorting mail at the American Bank. I never fully understood the extra things he did, only that they kept him away, only that he had two jobs, and on Sunday, he went with the Holy Name Men who went through the parish and gave to poor children, and I remember that because one Sunday he took my crayons, my only crayons, and gave them to a "poor child" and was so bitterly disappointed in me for my selfishhess that he sneered as he turned and left the house.
Where was the certain source of crayons in such a world? Way way off over the stony field of lassitude and sloth, in a dime store to which I might never drag anybody for years and years again, to get more crayons!
But he wasn't there. The heater was the light. I stood in the door of her room. I could see the heater. I could see something by it, something white, indistinct, white and dark, and glittering. I knew what it was but not why it was glittering.
I stepped into the room; the warm air hung there imprisoned by the door and the transom shut above it, and on the bed to my left, its head to the wall nearest me, she lay; the bed was where it was now, only it was old and iron and sagged and creaked and when you hid under it, you could see such dust in the coils of springs; it seemed quite fascinating.
Her head was raised, her hair, not yet shorn or sold, was long and dark all over her naked back and she shook with the cough, the light of the heater showing the thick ropy veins collected on her legs, and the pink panties over her small bottom.
What was that lying by the heater, dangerously, oh, God, it would catch fire like the legs of the chairs that were charred black when someone pushed them up against the heater and forgot about them and there was that smell of gas in the room, and the flames burnt orange, and I shrank up against the door.
I didn't care now if she was angry that I'd come down, if she told me to go back to bed, I wouldn't go, I couldn't go, I couldn't move.
Why did it glitter?
It was what they called a Kotex, a pad of soft white cotton fibers that she wore in her panties with a safety pin when she bled, and it was pinched in the middle from being worn and all dark with blood, of course, yet the glitter, why the glitter?
I stood at the head of her bed, and saw her, in the corner of my eye, sit up. Her coughing was now so bad, she had to sit up.
"Turn on the light," she said in her drunk voice. "Pull the shade, Triana, turn on the light."
"But that," I said, "but that." I moved closer to it, pointing, the Kotex white cotton pad creased in the middle and clotted with blood. It was swarming with ants! That's why it glittered! Oh, God, look at
Mother! Ants, ants everywhere over it, ants, you know, the way they could come and take over a plate left outdoors, swarming, devouring, tiny, impossible to kill.
"Mother, look, it's covered with ants, the Kotex!"