A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer: Stories

SEE AMID THE WINTER’S SNOW

1986

ONCE THEIR FACES easily pinked in the Christmas gaudy. Toy-mad and dithered, the boys at Christmas, running out of close parties and open to the wind. We crossed to walk the park side and looked up through the trees to see the sky was turned to firmament; the stars to ancient purpose; nothing was as it was, but indwelling spirit swelled and fat with Christmas. Mother buttered strudel and cried for no occasion except that they were gone, NettaandDaddy, her own, who used to have, who used to do, who always something-something at this time of year. Mother cried for me and for the boys and for my sister (who would not forgive her).

“But what have I done?” In the tunnels of tree stands, she cried, and at the first snow, and sometimes when the boys brushed against her, and always when the boys sang. Her tears delighted them. “Nana’s crying! Nana’s crying! Nana’s crying, Mother!”

“Mother,” I said, “come help me,” and she watched from a stool as I toothbrushed the silver.

“Who besides us is coming?” she asked.

“No one, no; and no to that question, too.” No, I am not. He did not, we never. She did not understand why I didn’t take him to court or why my in-laws kept their money or why I bothered to bake. What did she raise in me, my mother, except such disappointment that all I could do was rush from the kitchen and put on the music that made me feel holy and sad and slightly foolish? “Personent Hodie,” thumped and vigorous, embarrassed me, but “See amid the Winter’s Snow” was quieting, and Mother sipped her drink. I didn’t mind then the hard light, bright as any snowfield and flaring off the buildings our windows faced; I could stand to look hearing little-boy church voices vaulted in the background.

The boys were in the background, too; my own, and Mother’s, these boys talking for the toys they moved in battles sounded through the afternoon. The pursed, soured, shrunk about our lives, Mother’s as much as mine, fell away when the radiators shushed and spit and we were safe.

Where were the boys then just before Christmas?

Who would sugar the cookies?

Mother lay in bed and read whatever had taken her fancy in the airport: the royals this Christmas with their corgis at Balmoral — look! Mother wanted to live in a castle just like that — and why not? Didn’t she deserve it? Mother using up the bubbles in her afternoon ablutions. Mother was a red fragrance, profligately splashed. Her suitcase and the silky lingerie she packed were acrid with the mixed-up smell of her and her perfume and what she drank.

What did she bring that was new this time?

Less and less, the same and the favorites, lace ripped and straps thinned. Nothing to borrow…single earrings and unstrung pearls, dulled rings home mended with Band-Aids…grit in the boxes she used to case them, her jewels, as Mother called them. Her jewels or her sparkles…“Oh, what a Sparkle Plenty you are! Darling!” Mother was belling the cat with us now for how many Christmases? “Count,” and Mother did. “That was the year your father, your husband, my ex-husband, your ex-husband, the ugly boyfriend — who was he?”

“Mother, please, can we talk of something else, please.”

The snow tracks fast filling in with falling snow, winter solstice in the Sheraton Avenue house, where she sat at the top of the staircase and saw her handsome brothers off. Black mufflers, camel coats, lustrous patent leather dancing shoes, her brothers in formal dress. Mother said she saw them from the staircase and from the landing’s window sliding on those shoes, boys still, in and out of light. Good-bye! She huffed at the window to make a smoke to draw in, but the ring came out small and her mark disappeared.

“You dasn’t” was how the maid said no to Mother. “You dasn’t go in your brothers’ rooms when they are out.” My mother went in anyway, but looking for what?

“I wanted to be surprised,” Mother said. “I was nosy. Even when I knew what it was in a drawer, I opened it.”

I was also that way. For a long time, even after I knew the contents, I opened Mothers house; but she didn’t bother to look through my rooms anymore. In powdered undress she sat on the edge of my bed and said, “So this is Christmas.”

My sentiments exactly when the boys were gone, although there was tonight with the boys at the theater — her treat. “Remember?”

She had almost forgotten.

She said, “I don’t feel well today,” and she went back to bed with a littleglassofsomething, as she called it. She wanted to take advantage of the quiet and for a while to shut her eyes, to clear her head, to think of other things besides Christmas. Mother said, “I have no business buying theater tickets, but I’m glad I did, of course, for the boys. The boys should get to see good theater — only the expense of it!” Money, money, money, the icy blast of Christmas through the rotted sash. I had felt that chill before and longed for bed.

“Want more to drink?” I asked.

“You are so much like me,” Mother said, holding out her glass.

I hoped not, but I was.

I was rushing bacon and using too much soap on pans; whatever I cooked in them came out tasting soapy. “I can’t eat this, Mom,” from a boy. Me, forgetting and forgetting or getting there late. “Mom!” I was full of apology but unprepared. Whoever carried safety pins and never got lost? “I will make it work, I will make it work, be patient.” The boys did not believe me any more than I believed my mother when she said, “I promise.” Mother promised Rollerblades for Christmas; for the other boy, Australia. Mother said to me, “When he is twenty-one, I am taking him.”

“Does it snow in Australia?” he asked, come home and out of the sky’s new falling and already anxious to be gone again and released and dangerous and loud.

“Be quiet,” I said. “Both of you. Nana is resting.”

But Nana was calling to them, and if she was resting, then why was she talking?

They went on asking, “Nana?” walking into her room, trailing gifts from Dad to show but running out before they did.

“Nana’s crying, Mother!” from both boys in excited voices. “Nana’s crying!”

The stink of old-lady perfume, and Mother, an old lady, crying over it. “Not broken, only spilled,” I assured her, “and only a little spilled, all right then, enough to wear and not to cry over, Mother.” I righted the empty glass and set the clock back so she could better see it.

“Your sister has always been so angry,” Mother said to me, and she was crying again because we should have been together. “We’re too few as it is,” she said. “She should be here and her husband and those children. They don’t even know me. What are their names? You see, I forget. This is not my idea of Christmas.”

I reminded her about the theater and said tomorrow Frannie would call.

But NettaandDaddy, NettaandDaddy doused the plum pudding and put it aflame.

I said, “Your drink, Mother, here.”

“Your sister,” she said, sipping. “I don’t dare around her.”

Mother grunted off her bathrobe and trembled down the hall in just her nylons and brassiere. She said, “What are you going to wear?” and she watched me dress and wondered when it happened she got old, and I was old, too, she assured me, and my sister was older than both of us. Mother said, “Daddy wasn’t so very old when he died, yet poor Daddy. They would not let me see him. They didn’t even call in time for me to see him. They just put him in the ground. I found out later.”

“Mother…”

“See how you like it. See what it feels like…lost, and now you have to worry.”

“Mother…”

She was trying on my perfumes and asking, “Local?”

“Cheap,” I answered. I said yesandno to everything else she asked me. It is not as it was with NettaandDaddy; we will never again. “Give me,” I said and took her drink and snuffed the fumes and thought I would catch fire.

“Outside,” I said, “it looks like Christmas,” and it did. The snow, expected but turned larger, sifted in the wind and worked its intimate diminishment. Only the sky was left to see and violet-colored, lavish flakes falling on our tongues. Aahhhhhhh at the heavens running backward and Mother repeating, “I don’t dare fall. If I fall…” The boys said they would catch her. Then the snow’s assaulting angle sharpened, and it stormed, and we couldn’t see the sky, and Mother was crying. She was very, very drunk by then, and it came as no surprise to me that she fell at a curb, almost at the theater, amidst a host of people. Mother fell on her knees, and I let strangers help her.

1996

Yes, I think, yes, we are smiling at the missing boy’s smile, my mother and I, in the last room, low, north facing, dark, with harsh, budget carpet and trunklike furniture that a janitor bangs into with his cart — ouch! Over the noise of running water and, later, the vacuum, I shout at Mother, and I pretend that he is here, sixteen and shirtless, straightened teeth, the missing boy my mother says isn’t a baby anymore, is he?

The next time we are smiling at a boy for real, a grandson bending to his grandmother’s chair. Heartbreaker is what he is, and my mother says, “Yes,” and she touches his wrist. That point of grace or seriousness or whatever the boy’s wrist bone suggests, it is there that she touches him.

The white band of skin is from his watch.

Why no watch? I wonder. Where is it?

“Hello, Nana.”

“Louder,” I instruct.

“Hello, Nana!”

His hand, his shapely hand, is a ruddy reminder of health against the pale summer blanket Mother wears like swaddling. He turns out his hands, and Mother takes them to her face and smells. June, the white-flower month, ripe privet greens the air, and the palm against my mother’s face, I guess, must smell as sweet. I listen to her breathe him in. Her breathing is a screechy hinge to a garden my mother would speak of, her own. The garden is behind and around my mother; sun patches the floor — and the light! But the sound she makes makes me think how clean the boy must smell in a season not yet noon when Mother will be — how old will Mother be? Where is she?

Today she is in school. Today the ambulatory are teachers, and Mother must apologize for being late — again! — with homework. This is a visit we make in the summer, when the boy’s school is not in session.

“I perused the books,” Mother says. Then in a voice that suggests there might be spies punitively near, Mother whispers how she misses, misses her children; but after lunch Mother says, “Why be so fussy!” Mother's eyes don’t go along with her smile. Is she in there looking out her eyeholes at me?

“Mother?”

“You are older,” Mother says to me. “Oh, but you look so old!”

I am surprised, too, surprised to be as old as women once hard for me to look at.

Dressed in a blanket at table 3, Mother says, “Surprise me,” and she lets herself be fed. “I know peas,” Mother says, now lighthearted. “I’m hungry.”

“You are older,” Mother says to me after what has just passed for lunch. “Oh, but you look so old!” To the boy, suddenly evident, she says, “Come closer,” and he does. He bends close enough for her to touch his shoulder.

His shoulder and his arms are firmly shaped, and as with every part of him — his teeth, his skin — he is unmarked and smooth. He might take anything on — he could carry his nana!

“So she can see you,” I say, and the boy is on his knees close enough for her to touch his shoulder, but she touches his nipple instead.

“Mom!” he says.

I keep my mouth shut so tightly my teeth hurt. Don’t ask me why. I say, “Take up her hand and squeeze it tight.”

When this boy frowns, he looks like his older brother.

Mother, in her chair, says she can drive around, too, and I curl on the floor at her feet like a dog and sleep. When I wake, Mother and I are at the top of a sloping lawn that meadows to a lake. Mother is talking to her mother about the rain: how the lake is high from it, rain and more rain. The rains bruise the ruffled flowers. The lake is black.

Now in our dream comes more rain; it peens the water colorless.

Now a white sky and commonly blue water, and now black water, choppy. I think I hear the neighbors jumping in off the dock.

“Agnes!” someone cries, and Mother startles. “It’s a bird.” The snake has eaten its eggs, she explains, and we must be careful. Mother says, “Be careful. These aren’t just grass snakes but something bigger,” and she holds up her little feet in immaculately white canvas sneakers.

Mother’s snakes, once they slither into her story, they stay, and their slime, she says, is like snot, and it sickens her, really, and she gags. She leans over the chair and spits up all the peas she ate.

I am glad the boy is not here to see the depressant clarity of the unused, the way they wipe down the rooms here and swipe at the blinds. I wonder, Does Mother notice? The tightly rigged bed bleeps alarm: just my purse against the pillow sets it off.

A nurse strides in and scolds, “Again!”

I am curled at Mother’s feet like a dog when here is a nurse asking, “What are you doing?”

“This is the safest place to sleep,” I say. “The bed rings.”

Oh, this is no birdcage, Mother’s nursing home, not the birdcage she liked in La Jolla, with its patio views of the ocean. That unobstructed tower in the sun, does she remember it, the one I think she planned on and often pointed to, saying, “That’s where the gray ladies perch.”

Thank heavens the boy is not here to hear us sighing into a gaze over something of his. Today I have the boy’s books, paperbacks mostly, but this one — look! Chemistry! The split spine has loosed its cover; the cover wags like a tooth from how he worried it. Clearly, the book has been handled; clearly, he worked. “Like you, Mother,” I say, “he wants to be a good student.”

Mother says, “I am.”

Mother turns the missing boy’s watch cap inside out to where the dark spice of his scalp is strongest. I know; I have smelled it and felt, too, the wet wool between my fingers and thought, How itchy it must be. And, Why does he wear it?

With the watch cap at her mouth, can Mother see him?

Hooded in a sweatshirt, he stands with his thumped fists pushing out his pockets. He rocks on his feet; his eyes are shut, water drips from his nose. The boy might be this way to her or in the back row of class, a goof-off with his watch cap on, captioning lewd drawings, or maybe she sees the long slide of his legs stuck out to trip up his friend.

“How did he get to be so unattractive!” she asks. “How did he?”

The boy? I am outraged. I am thinking, You, you are unattractive, Mother.

What did she expect? Of course, this is not the boy who ran steeply in circles on the field that was the beach when the tide was out, but he is still a pleasure to look at.

Take up the hankie weight of his shapely T-shirt, the washed sock, the sticky handle to his racket, and he might be seen as he was some afternoons when he skidded on the court or, later, when his wet hair was combed back and blackly curling at his ear.

Take up the hoop he wears. Is the post still warm, or the strap to his watch? (His watch, at least, is not lost!) The graduation gifts, see them? The watch again, the pen, the unpolished buckle decoratively scored and darkly initialed. A girl’s name gouged in his journal cover, the journal from the suitcase I have brought of things to show Mother because he will not come, not today at least. Here is a braided bracelet from the summer, a stained bandanna. What does Mother know of him, the boy who is missing, except what I put into her hands? The boy’s blue shirt, ironed spineless as a towel, I put the boy’s shirt into Mother’s hands.

All the missing boys, we miss them.

“He is not a baby anymore,” Mother says.

“No, no,” and not so young, and hardly dutiful, though I have wished. I have wished for his company through the watery heat I have had to wade through just to get here.

Mother’s room is north facing; the inside air is cold.

2000

Our mother is living in the home state again in the deadend part of one of those places for when there are no other places but this, a tiled corridor bristling with obstruction, idlers in slippers, uncomfortable chairs, carts, screens, trays, lids. Every door is open, even to the lady who shouts.

Mother, I don’t think, shouts; but Faye on the night shift says that she hits. In the last few days Mother has grown more bewildered, and she doesn’t want to go to bed. Faye has told me Mother says she has given up looking for us. Mother says her girls are with Netta and Daddy at the lake. Netta and Daddy are taking care of us.

I saw our mother in June, my sister saw her in October, but both times all our mother talked about was home, the one Mother had with Netta and Daddy on the lake. Our mother talks of the lake; she talks of lawns and elms around her — elms not yet sick. Mother grew up in the shade of these in a house with help, a cook, a baker, a laundress, old Peter, who just raked the leaves. The house looked out to the lake, the one she talks about now, asking, “Are you out at the lake? Have you seen Netta and Daddy?”

We don’t understand it. Why, if our mother has released herself to wander, can’t Mother wander near the ocean? The ocean brought skies that soothed her. “Oh, look at the size of those clouds!” Mother would say. “Will you look at the size of those clouds!” Spacious, God-blown clouds they were, and we spent a lot of time looking up.

So why did we bring Mother to the downward look of home, except that she is nearer home? Our mother is back in the home state, where the winters are so long. The sky, too, is not much to look at; and the lake, Mother's lake, is severe — very deep. Her lake, we remember, is silty, unusually dark, a green almost blue, and in no way like the lakes across the road. Those lakes in this land of lakes are shallow enough to be yellow. Some are swamps; mosquitoes appear on the first warm breath. September, October, November. Mosquitoes dangling over the pumpkin gore, Indian summer, it is easy to be stung then. Common in March and April to see the insects’ soft appearance, or to walk through snows and snow fogs in May, to fan our underarms in August heat come in early June. Spring in the home state is often no spring at all. Summer is changeable, humid as a mouth sometimes or parched.

Look out the window. See for yourself.

“Look out the window, Agnes!” is what Faye says she says to our mother, but our mother stares at her lap. Her head, Mother says, is too heavy to lift. Besides, she has seen it. She knows where she is. Mother is belted in her chair and slumped. The nurses keep her parked near the station, where she hides behind her hair and barks. She will talk only in her room. She will talk about the lake. She will cry. “Tell Netta and Daddy we are never to be apart again. Camp is almost over.”

A ringing phone confuses her unless it’s held against her ear, then Mother knows to talk. She asks, “Are you out at the lake? Will you send old Peter for me? I want to go out with Daddy in the Shepherd and watch the race.”

This Mother is sixteen again and rocking in the mahogany chest Daddy calls the Shepherd. The warmed leather seat where she sits in the back puts her to sleep, that and the rocking motion of the boat against the pier, because Daddy is not yet ready to let Agnes’s older brother cast off.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Daddy is always mad at the grown-up sons, the brothers; but Agnes, Daddy adores. She is only Daddy’s no matter what that Netta says. Netta is the one who doesn’t belong. She is jealous of what Agnes can do. Agnes can swim and so be with Daddy; poor Netta never learned how.

On the porch and sitting sternly, Netta does needlework that strains her eyes; she sits with her back to the pier, preferring a view of the garden.

The pier, the lake, that part of the estate removed from Netta, is where Agnes spends most of her time. The pier is not so long as it is wide. There is a floating dock Agnes swims to, or else on the pier she puts a project between her legs and glues or paints. Agnes starts before the pier is in the sun, when it is cold yet and wet underfoot; the water soaks the first layer of newspaper she lays to work on. The backs of her oiled legs are inky, and her sticky fingertips catch in her hair. Her hair! Her hair is a spun sugar, a matter of light, fine as glass and a white blond — even between her legs.

Oh, put your hand to it now, feel!

Agnes is aflame, and flammable with such fair skin, she uses an umbrella in the sun.

Is it any wonder then that Daddy wants her in his boat? To keep an eye on her and hold off boys.

Agnes’s spun-sugar hair, her white-blond hair, whiskers her breasts when she bends to her work. “Not bad,” she says, appraising what she has done, “but I should have, I should have…” Her jealous mother on the porch agrees. Her jealous mother calls the work dashed off and nothing serious.

Agnes is sixteen, and her chest shows a cleft when she bends, and there, between her breasts, Agnes sweats.

After forty, she will have no desires.

My sister and I hold the phone to our ears and breathe. We talk about Mother and the drapery of her skin, for instance, and what’s between her legs.

We think of our legs, too, each of us, alone; I can hear how we breathe; I know.

We are lucky to live far away. We don’t have to see our mother. We can get reports from Faye.

Faye says, “Yesterday it was horses. In the stable next door a boy was crying because his horse had died.”

I wonder — my sister wonders — How did Mother find dead horses?

Faye says, “Remember how old she is.”

Our mother, talking at the phone, is purely sixteen. Agnes is sixteen years old and talking boys, always boys. Always it is the boys with her, that is what Agnes's jealous mother on the porch says. “Always boys,” she is muttering. “Agnes…we’re going to…” Oh, that jealous mother’s shadowed face is witchy. Just look! Look at her! Under a light made for handiwork, Agnes’s mother is beading sweaters. She is sewing doll clothes, using her hands, loving her hands, loving them in the arduous business of manicures. The jealous mother’s fingernails are pearls. Agnes wants to suck them. She wants to pet her mother’s oily hair. She wants to ring a finger with it, play with its crimped, thick curliness. Netta’s hair is black, too, nothing of Agnes’s white blond is there.

And this is important: only Netta’s hands are pretty, which is why Netta is so jealous of Agnes. Agnes is beautiful all over. That’s the word used, beautiful, and once a boy in a boat used radiant to describe her. “The radiant Agnes under her umbrella,” he said, then something else, but what it was Agnes does not remember.

Agnes does not want to remember everything.

Faye says that even parked near the glass doors, parked with no other place to look but out, our mother will not look out. She refuses to be jogged from the lake. Snowed-over shapes, rain, passing coats, none of what is happening around our mother is happening. The way our mother sees it, she is sixteen.

Agnes is sixteen years old. She wants to quit school, go to Italy, and study art. She is interested in the men, too, yes, sure, that’s true. At sixteen, Agnes is a sweet sweet on sweets — she won’t deny it. Also, and not to be forgotten, Agnes is rich.

No wonder then that Daddy wants her in the Shepherd, away from all the boys and to himself. No wonder then that she can’t stay in school — could anyone? Agnes wants to go to Italy and paint, and oh — why not say it? — she wants to fuck around; she is luxurious.

Luxurious women do not need big breasts — that’s a myth, although Agnes contends Daddy likes them. Lucky then that the witchy wife has them — and her hands, of course, her pearly nails; but Daddy likes his witchy wife’s heavy breasts. These Agnes has seen Daddy straining after from as far away as the pier. They are a whiteness under the close lamp; the rest of Netta is smudged. Gray, beige, claret, brown, of these Netta usually wears brown. Even in the summer she wears long brown skirts and horrible shoes, like men’s shoes with stacked heels. The hats she picks to wear are squat; flowers, birds, and clouds of veil are perched on them. Each jewel she owns has a blouse to go with it. Netta’s is a grave style — but her daughter! That Agnes! Her wispy daughter is another story. Wispy, yes, slight, whimsical, coy, feathered, birdlike, catlike are all words used to describe that girl.

Where did Agnes come from?

Who taught her how to dress?

Agnes is walking in mismatched shoes. She is wearing white when she should not, wrong clothes to right affairs. To the parties her mother approves of, Agnes comes breathless and late.

None of this matters now. Our mother can be late or she can be early. “Calm down!” Faye says they have to say to her. “Agnes, dear, calm down. You haven’t missed a thing. You’re on time.”

Our mother cries, “I am sorry,” and she tells the nurses that she is painfully, painfully, painfully shy, although no one would know it to watch her. No one would guess how hard it is for her to talk when there are so many people in the room. Our mother is, she confesses, a long tremble. She stays in her chair. She says, “I have to be careful I don’t fall.”

Our mother stays in her chair now most of the time, slack as a bathrobe, tottering, mumbling, giving her excuses to the floor.

“Yes,” we say to Faye, “we have seen her, we can guess.”

Our mother asks the same questions.

We are thousands of miles away from our mother — have been for years — and yet our mother asks, “Are you with Netta and Daddy? Are you out at the lake?”

Our mother says, “I don’t think Netta likes me anymore. She never comes to visit.”

That must be why Agnes goes back to the lake long after she has left sixteen: it is to see her witchy, jealous mother, who even from her bed on her back at eighty is castigating, “Agnes…what are we?” when Agnes is not sixteen anymore. She has not been any trouble for years, although she can’t remember where she put her babies. Her babies, the boys, the dead ones — these are her troubles, these are what Agnes has to be sorry for.

There are dead horses in the home state, dead babies; she begins to make sense.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God!” our mother cries, or else Mother speaks to them, the boys, the dead babies. She says their names and cries.

Mother never says she drank.

Our mother has seen her sons through the scrim of the other side. She has talked to them. She tells Faye the boys are grown up. They are young men with Daddy’s eyes.

“Not yours or yours,” our mother says, and she swears at the nurses. “Yours are shit.”

Faye tells us; Faye tells on Mother.

Faye says one of the nurses slapped our mother by accident when Mother tried to work her way out from under the belt they use to secure her. Our mother is a danger to herself and will sometimes try to walk. She will get to the lake however she can. “Better not try it!” Faye says, and she tells our mother it is cold outside. The lake is frozen.

Snowless, black, flecked with frosts, the lake is a starry sky with Agnes skating on it. She is a skater. No one would believe it to look at her — but look! Her ankles are bone; skates don’t hurt. Only the cold hurts. It blows at the bridge of her nose and gives her a headache. Skating home, she is skating into the wind. The arctic air hits the tops of her legs, which is why she can’t move them now! “For God’s sake,” Agnes says, “tell Netta to get the Epsom salts, and tell her no cold water, please!”

Our mother says the camp food stinks. She says, “Oh, boy, when I get home.” When she gets home, she wants a lot of Hattie’s custard. “Tell Netta,” our mother has instructed us, my sister and me, “tell Netta to ask Hattie, please.”

Faye says that the day nurses often report on our mother’s unwillingness to eat. Our mother says, “This is not what I ordered!”

With Daddy it is baked Alaska. With Daddy it is the Waldorf, where Agnes wears a hat and lots of lipstick. The reason she has no eyebrows is she has no eyebrows! Her hair is still white blond but short, very short, a boy’s on a face with a punched-out mouth. Some part of her there is always swollen. The ledge above her eye, a greater prominence in places prominent — here and here and here — Agnes tends these greater lumps. She wraps elbows in Ace bandages, holds ice against her jaw. “She is a mess,” the witchy jealous mother tells anyone who asks. “What happened this time?” This time, like the last, Agnes simply did not look. She never looks but that she runs, runs after whatever it is rolling away on the incline. The witchy mother says, “Lucky Daddy isn’t alive to see this.”

Our mother’s fingernails are yellow.

“Poor thing,” Faye says, but she lets our mother ring and ring, knowing what it is she wants, which is just what she can’t have.

Our mother, on the phone, says, “My brothers don’t like me. They think I am bad, but I am not. I am trying to be good. I want to go back to the lake.” And she does.

Our mother is sixteen. Under the umbrella and oiled against the sun and half asleep, she is an open jam jar in the heat, a white honey, an edible fragrance, a light the boys look up at from their boats. “Agnes,” they say, with nothing else to say. They use her name and idle near her, rocking on the wakes of other passing boys, always someone, someone waving, calling out, “Agnes!”

Agnes has a flask, too; Agnes drinks and smokes and knows the names to pills.

No wonder then that Daddy says, “In the boat, Agnes, now.”

In the Shepherd Agnes holds out her hand and rakes the water. Agnes says, “Daddy is right about the boys. I always pick the wrong ones.” Faceless men whose faces she knows are some of what she sees in the water.

Faye says our mother says that as soon as Daddy gets here, she is leaving. Cars can be heard cracking over the gravel. Our mother hears the cars and cries out, “Daddy’s sent old Peter for me. I knew it!” The nurses wheel her out of the bingo room because she is crying. Our mother is crying, “I want to go out in the Shepherd with Daddy and see the races.”

Our mother, in her room, goes on and on about it, how she isn’t good with numbers but she will try. She wants to play. Mother wants to go out again, please. She wants to try. “I’ll be good, I’ll be good, I’ll be good. I want to get out of this shit-hole place. Jesus!” And his name, the way she says it, comes out sorrowful and red.

Then Agnes is not sixteen anymore but a woman with dead babies — only dead babies, which is surely what she means when she talks of the dead horses. Sets of silver and dishes, named cars, Italy long after she has thrown away her brushes, our mother does not ask anymore where it is packed.

A lot, of course, has been sold — had to be. Our mother’s daddy is dead; the trust fund he left her is nearly depleted.

Our mother can’t tell us apart on the phone, but she knows our voices. She remembers our names; and when we answer to them, she cries that she is ready. She wants to go back to the lake, to Netta, of course, and Daddy.

“Please,” she says, “it’s time.”

Our mother’s incessant cries, we can hear them when we are not on the phone. We can smell her when the nurses lift her into bed. We don’t need Faye to tell us. We can see, we can see Agnes; she is a girl, and then for a long, long time she is not.

1960

Her arms belonged to a Hattie, potato-white, fat-puckered, floury-fat arms, which when she lifted them to put away the jam smelled sour. Hattie was a sour-smelling cook, finished work and in a coat — no sweater! Unbuckled boots and too-small scarf despite the cold. Outside in a running car Hattie’s husband was waiting. He was the one to drive her. These were the baking days, those sighing days — less light and nearing holidays — when he brought Hattie here in the morning gloom and took her home, darkling.

Hard to see under the bill of his cap, a farmer’s cap, and he, a farmer, smelling of mucked stalls and cheese. We had smelled him before. Mr. Rassmusen, Elmer Rassmusen as he was called by Netta, whose house it was where Hattie baked. “Mr. Rassmusen is here, Netta!” from us, waiting for the cookies to cool, the awful-sounding cookies that tasted so good: Springerle. “Does Mr. Rassmusen get any?”

Hattie says, “He has his heart to think about.” Phony eggs and no bacon are what he has for breakfast now, poor man! They sold their chickens — what’s the use? Hardscrabble is the word Frannie thinks of, and the cornstalks’ yellow clatter in the wind when the wind blats through, as it mostly does, in our country in the dead of winter. What a phrase! Don’t use it. The dead go nowhere; we have dug them up.

(Mother has some babies in the ground, but I think they do not sleep.)

Hattie says, “Be careful you don’t burn your tongues,” and she shuffles to the car in her unbuckled boots. The path is all ice and she is stooped against falling.

The thought of her bare arms beneath her rough coat makes us itch. Let’s never be poor!

Poor Hattie was farm-poor and ugly, ugly and poor as the old women Netta visited. Netta took us to Miss Pearl’s, whose cookies made us sick. “No thank you,” we said, polite girls and sisters, born wide years apart but matching. Miss Pearl, the dressmaker, pinned us for approaching birthdays; but March was not as close as Netta thought. Uncertainties, instructions, moments of clarity and surprise, bright hurts.

(My mother’s face in a mirror we once shared first informed me of beauty.)

Frannie is oldest; I am youngest. A sister in between would be nice — Frannie says. Frannie says it is sad about our brothers.

“Where were you girls?” from Netta, already thinking of next year’s Christmas, needling sequins to sew on a saddle. The camel is for the wise men on their journey. Across the desert! Under the stars!

Netta didn’t know about the dog, how he plashed across the river and came home steaming. She didn’t know how long we had played outside but that Hattie was here, yes; Netta said she could smell it, and we could, too: the onion odor of the woman mixed with butter and almond.

(Mother, I remember, unbuttoning even as she ran up the stairs, crying, “I can’t stand myself!”)

One day the pocky rain beat away the snow.

We made toffee without Hattie in the kitchen or Netta to boss us. The toffee was oversweet and hot and dripped off a stick — from the garden? Then our birthdays passed and we were in the garden. We were shoeless, sockless, and putting on a play that Frannie had directed because it was her idea in the first place.

Frannie’s flaxen braids went past her waist so she could sit on them and play Rapunzel.

(Did I mention that our mother was an actress?)

Hattie was not a woman of expression or patience, but she played our audience and gruffed, “What girls you are! What made you think of this?”

Sometimes her surprise surprised us, as when we piled what we picked out, which she then scolded us to eat. But who likes bitter rind in jelly? And why not swig vanilla? The way it smelled, we thought it would be sweet!

(“She gets it from her mother,” they say about me.)

Frannie is Frannie and good, smart, responsible, those stout terms grown-ups use on us wearing their accurate faces. Hattie does not have many faces. With her it’s a scowl or a smile…and she looks like…Netta says, “Eleanor Roosevelt!” Hattie, apron off and in her everyday clothes, looks like Eleanor Roosevelt, top heavy, jowled, a preposterous hat. Her teeth, too — Hattie’s — are made out of wood and wooden yellow.

Netta says to us, “Be thankful for what you’ve got.”

“I am!” Frannie says, and I say, “We are!”

We are, we are, we are, we are everywhere running through the house, shooed out of rooms. “Go outside or watch TV!” In the old war footage the women wear scarves and rush across rubble.

“Aren’t you glad you weren’t born then?” Netta asks because she was alive then. She lived through the war although not as meanly; nevertheless, she says, “Really, aren’t you glad you weren’t born then?”

“We are!” but we like to pretend we are the dispossessed, and we pick at Hattie’s coffee cake to make it last the war. The snow blows up and sideways, and what was close outdoors is blurred in so much weather. Will Mr. Rassmusen drive through it? The whiteness squalls across the fields.

(I miss my mother.)

Stranded in the country! Even the sander couldn’t get through to us, not to mention Mr. Rassmusen. Hattie said, “His heart is old…I hope he knows enough to stay at home.” By then the phones were down and the deep house groaned. The sound was the sound of ice settling over the lake, and we ran away from what we heard, ran throat-hurt through our Netta's house. The magical house, the big house, the house I wanted as my own. The doors when opened huffed attic air, and we danced across the ballroom and slid to the windows and saw snow-blind-close trees. Who could get near us?

(In another house I put my mouth over Mother’s and cried down to a baby, “Can you hear me?”)

Hattie is shouting into the dead phone so Mr. Rassmusen might hear. “See how the roads are tomorrow. Don’t drive!” This big, ugly woman is in tears. Thirty-five years come June and she can count on her hand the nights apart from Mr. Rassmusen. They met when they were not much older than we are. Their daddies both farmed. But it’s never been dull, farm life. Farm life is full of incident: bladed equipment, animals, blood.

Tonight Hattie’s story is the fox! Found midwinter, his flattened, frozen carcass breaks in half when P.J. bats with it. That P.J.! He came to collect Hattie once and walked in calling, “Ma!” There wasn’t but the one car and Hattie heeding to it.

Out here the land is vacant. The fields look sad.

We should have a fire and sit close, knee to knee, feet to the flames — let the heat muddle us! We should get warm enough to wander. Netta's house is very large and unlived in without kids. Netta says she loves having us live here. “You have no idea,” she says, “how much.” We roam and look into and open; we make the house ours and use different tubs, strike fires in comfortable rooms, because Frannie can use matches. She lights the library fire and we sit with Hattie’s cookies in our laps, eating, lazing, reading until we leave the stupefying fire to lean against the windows in the sunroom with the parrots. How cool it is, but what is that we smell? What is Hattie making?

Hattie says, “Now you’re in the kitchen, do you want to help?”

We stand beating and beating the frosting, which catches on our arms, so we lick at ourselves until the frosting peaks and we can make a road down the middle. We’re done! Done and dumbed with sugar and listening—shhhhh.

The plow makes cow noises as it lumbers up the hill, and somewhere men in clouds of snow are tossing sand and shoveling. Mr. Rassmusen, we hope, stays in; such strenuous work could kill him — his heart. His heart and his back! Hattie hopes the man is smart enough to make P.J. do it. P.J. is young. P.J. is not much older than we are; but he smells like a man to us, earthy and unsafe. Unshaved, unwashed, uncouth. Uncouth? Frannie’s word. She can be a show-off, Frannie can. She can smarm her way into something sweet. Hattie simply forgets what time it is — almost dinner! — and she tells us stories. The day P.J. and his older brothers went shirtless near the forage blower and came out bloodied with their own blood or something else’s. Hattie’s stories. The sick-making smell of skunk and the mutt’s whining home from it. Who dared go near him? Even when he smelled of himself or of the marshy water he swam in, that mutt was not a dog to get close to. The rats in her barn sleeked through the silage, fearless. Hattie’s stories. Cows and horses, litters of kittens found egged in strawed places, this was how she lived. She left out sadness.

The coarse stink of onion grass and her rushed and dingy hairdo. Hattie in the sleeveless dress she wears to cook in — housecoat cotton, no matter the cold — Hattie is here when she is not here. Hattie’s slippers and sleeveless dress she keeps in the backstairs bathroom. We have to hold our breath the whole time in there — hurry!

This happened in the middle of summer in the middle of another play of Frannie’s devising. My part was small, but it called for me to swing the hammock until Frannie fell out. Of course, she fell too hard; but it was not, Netta assured me, my fault.

Hattie said, “It’s both yews’ fault.”

I hated Hattie then.

Frannie had her cast signed so many times it looked like her yearbook page. Silly flowers and hearts in colored pens, accounts of love, old secrets. She wrapped her arm in plastic and held it in the air when she swam; she screamed if she thought I had splashed her. “Get a towel!” She was fearful the ink might run and the precious cast crumble.

(Mother used a hanger and scratched her own back bloody; I saw.)

Someone’s coming; headlights rove over the snow, and Hattie hopes it is not who she thinks it is, but his headlights show in the falling. The rest is darkness.

(They say our mother is happier where she is.)

What did Hattie know then that we did not?

(Mother had her secrets; she had more than most.)

The passenger door was ledged with snow that sighed over Hattie when she closed it.

My dream began that all was blackness and terrible stars, yet they could see where they were going, and the roads, too, I thought, were cleared. They drove in heat and quiet, and Hattie took her scarf off and smoothed what she wore for hair. There wasn’t much.

“Lick,” Hattie saying. “Lick the spoon.”

That smell I brushed against waiting at her waist for her lap.

Come back!