Florida

MOTHER

SHE WAS ON HER knees and rubbing her back against parts of the house and backing into corners and sliding out from under curtains, rump polishing the floor, and she was saying, “Sit with me, Alice.” She was saying, “Talk to me. Be a daughter. Tell me what you’ve been doing.” She spoke uninflectedly, as if thinking of something else — the dishes to do, drawers to line, clotted screens to clean out with a toothpick. Handles missing, silver gone, and a Walter in the next room unwilling to leave!

Bitch, bitch, bitch, the sound the broomsticks made against the floor in Mother’s nettled cleaning and talking to herself, asking, “What am I doing? What does it look like I am doing?”

“You are stupid,” I overheard Walter say to my mother. “You’d be better off dead.”

And Walter was as smart as any professor; he was the first to admit it, saying to my mother, “Why are you so stupid?” Stupid about composers and who was playing. Stupid about motherhood and about how much money she had. Why didn’t she know, why didn’t she plan ahead? Why was it always up to him to think it out for her? Walter sat in the armchair and sipped at his whiskey and held out a hand no one took.

All day he sipped warm whiskey from a highball glass. He smoked cigarettes; he listened to his records on Mother’s stereo — crashing, oppressive, classical sound. If Walter spoke, it was to shout for it, “Louder!” when I was thinking the music was already too loud. Enough, I was thinking, creeping nearer to the stereo myself with other ideas for music. The composer’s portrait on the long-playing album cover looked, I thought, like Walter. They shared a melancholy nose and disappointed mouth, old-fashioned eyeglasses, Einstein hair.

I never saw him in the sun or on a sidewalk, never at the porch or beside the car about to open a door for Mother. I never saw Walter laughing. The brown yolks of his eyes had broken and smeared to a dog-wild and wounded gaze. He was not handsome; yet I looked long at the length of him slant in a chair with his drink.

No man Mother knows seems to work. They go away sometimes in the day and come back wrinkled. They come back to us and sit half the night half concealed by the wing chair’s wings. They drink and listen to music.

“The Germans,” Walter said. “Schubert.”

Sometimes I found Walter crying in the chair, and once I found him in the morning on the downstairs couch in a twisted sheet with Mother.

With my father it had been different.

At the restaurant one winter afternoon, months before he died, we made a scene; we dragged the waiter into our story; we were the last to leave. I danced around the heavy black tables and the matching chairs; I spun on the barstools and watched the TV. Mother cried, and she let herself be kissed.

“We’re drunk,” Mother said. “We are.”

“Open wide,” my father was saying to her and then to me, “open wider.”

One winter afternoon — an entire winter — it was my father who was taking us. Father and Mother and I, we were going to Florida — who knew for how long? I listened in at the breakfast table whenever I heard talk of sunshine. I asked questions about our living there that made them smile. We all smiled a lot at the breakfast table. We ate sectioned fruit capped with bleedy maraschinos — my favorite! The squeezed juice of the grapefruit was grainy with sugar and pulpy, sweet, pink. “Could I have more?” I asked, and my father said sure. In Florida, he said it was good health all the time. No winter coats in Florida, no boots, no chains, no salt, no plows and shovels. In the balmy state of Florida, fruit fell in the meanest yard. Sweets, nuts, saltwater taffies in seashell colors. In the Florida we were headed for the afternoon was swizzled drinks and cherries to eat, stem and all: “Here’s to you, here’s to me, here’s to our new home!” One winter afternoon in our favorite restaurant, there was Florida in our future while I was licking at the foam on the fluted glass, biting the rind and licking sugar, waiting for what was promised: the maraschino cherry, ever-sweet every time.

MOTHER

A DIFFERENT WINTER AND a different kind of winter, the air peated with dark and me swimming through it, I saw, or thought I saw, the car’s red lights receding: good-bye, good-bye. By then Mother’s nose had been broken, so that whenever she spoke, she sounded stuffed up. “Good-bye, good-riddance,” she was saying to Walter when we were caught up in our Florida.

Mother promised that in our Florida, hers and mine, we would get a bird, a large, showy bird, a talker, someone who could say more than “hiya” and his name, but a sleek and brightly beaked bird — a talker, excited, scrabbling on the bar, saying, “Alice, Alice”—a bird that would live on and on, not some dumb Polly.

Mother promised that in Florida I could hold the hand mirror to the sun to start a fire; in Florida there would be no need of matches. “The heat,” she said, “the steamy heat, the pink sand. Try to imagine.”

Mother’s toenails winked in the foil bed we knew for Florida. Her toenails were polished in a black-red put on thick. Her fingernails she wore as they were: skin-colored, square-cut, clear. The ragged moons on some nails she showed me signaled deprivations — not enough milk or an unrelieved fever — such losses, experienced in a mother’s womb, could be read on the teeth, Mother told me, when the teeth were discolored. She said, “Look at Walter.” Mother’s terrible Walter had grown up in a place always warm and yet his smile, Mother said, revealed his sorrows.

He covered up his teeth when he was smiling; he hid behind his hands. Caught chewing, he looked caught. He looked angry or dismayed. Walter frowned at me a lot, or that was how it seemed to me when Mother wasn’t home. With this Walter there were no foam drinks, no maraschino cherries, no promises and kisses. He brooded, he swore, he drank.

The day Walter left, the phone was ringing and the TV was never shut off. Lights came on. There was crying. Car doors slammed, cars started, high beams swept the drive. We might have been a TV show was how it looked to me from the window where I saw a woman in a nightgown prepared to stop the car by merely standing in front of it. Mother held out her arms and was, I thought, pleading please to stay or to take her, too, but please, not on any account, please not to leave. “No, no, no, no, no,” she was crying. “Please!”

Then Walter was yelling from the car at me, saying, “Your mother’s the one. She’s a crazy, bloody woman! She wants all of my money!”

“Get out!” I shouted, and then Mother shouted, too, “Get out, get out! Leave us alone!”

ARTHUR

WAVY GROUNDS, OLD TREES, floating nurses. Mother called it “the San.” I visited only once — too scared to go again — and remember that Mother’s shirtwaist dress no longer fit and strained the pin that pinned her. “Ouchie,” she said, a baby-voiced girl, and she fiddled off the pinhead then started to cry, saying, “Now I can’t stand up!” speaking as if to someone else though there was no one else but me in her room at the time. “I can’t see my little girl off. My skirt will fall down and my Alice will be embarrassed.” I was embarrassed by her and glad to leave Mother behind and took the stairs, which were faster, to the car where Aunt Frances was talking to a doctor, and Arthur was waiting to drive us away.

Arthur had, as part of his job, driving to do. Arthur did the errand-driving in any-old-day clothes, but he dressed in a coat when he drove Aunt Frances anywhere. With me he wore his leather jacket — smelly, cracked, collared in a matted yarn, brown. I don’t remember what he was wearing that day when he drove Mother to the San. It was cold, I remember.

“Miss Alice,” Arthur had called to Mother, “please get in.”

Mother was wearing the falling-leaves coat in the falling-leaf colors, a thing blown it was she seemed, past its season, a brittle skittering across the icy snow to where Arthur stood by the car, fogged in.

I attended to the drama of Mother’s clothes, the smoke-thin nightgown she wore before Arthur came; I wanted it. She wisped through the house in this nightgown and eschewed electric light and carried candles. “Go to sleep,” she had said, come upon me spying, and I said to her, “You, too!” but Mother was awake and moving through the house and out across the snow — Mother shouting back at me, “You’re not invited!” Later she cried, and I sat under the crooked roof of her arm and felt her gagged and heaving sorrow. “If your father were here …”

But my father was dead and my name was hers and everyone said I was surely her daughter, so why did she leave me except that she did? The next day she was off to her Florida, and I was off to mine.

MOTHER

THE COILED TRAIL OF the car lighter in the dark reminded me of Mother when Uncle Billy was smoking and supervising Arthur as he carried to the backdoor and into the kitchen roped boxes from Mother’s house. Suitcases, clocks, chiming clocks, more boxes. Uncle Billy held out the fur hat to me. “Where she is now,” he said, “your mother won’t need it.” The hat in my hand came alive; I felt it warm and breathing and felt the weak heat hushing from the baseboards against my ankles, my feet.

Arthur was driving again. He was driving past shapes crouched in sleeping fields, past unplowed snows and smokeless chimneys. Grimaced light and hard snow, loose doors, abandonment. “Is it time to go to Uncle Billy’s?” I asked. “Are we here already?” Here at Arlette’s, at Nonna’s, at Uncle Billy’s, at Nonna’s, no logic to the rotation, no meaning I could figure except to know the first house and the last at different ends of the lake. Uncle Billy’s house was first — brick walk, cold wind, water, water roughing against the shore. I saw the water’s darkness in the distance when so much else was under snow. But the ledges from the rock gardens jutted out like tongues; and the trees, standing before the moon, were reprimanded. The moon was a scold.

“Outside after dark is for animals,” Aunt Frances said. “Come inside where it is warm.”

Hardly warm! The old sashes rattled in the windows — hundreds, all sides — so that a cold air rimmed the rooms and rooms and rooms of Uncle Billy’s house. “There!” someone pointed: Great-Granddaddy in an accomplished pose, painted a year shy of his dying. I looked at his eyes, and it seemed to me he did not want to live and that Mother was right: Great-Granddaddy had rushed into his dying.

Uncle Billy said to Aunt Frances, “That sounds like something my sister would say,” and Aunt Frances said to me, “I don’t know what your mother allowed, but here we talk only of living,” and she took away my picture books of pyramids of rings and shoes. “Depressing photographs,” she said, and she gave me books on animals instead. I liked these, too, and I liked the new haircut; it was better than what Mother usually did. Mother who would never fix me. “I can’t do French braids,” Mother had once confessed. “Look at me! Wear a hat!”

Aunt Frances, holding up clothes from my suitcase — socks, shirt, the same hat — said, “Why aren’t these name tagged?” And she gave my clothes to Arlette. Dragged hems, belts broken, Arlette could fix almost anything provided I helped.

“Hold still!” Arlette said, or “we’ll go to Miss Pearl. Hold still!” Little wiggler, little bungler, always dirtying herself! “I remember,” Arlette said, and then she told such stories I had just as soon forget.

On any day in the week, I wanted to be away from Uncle Billy’s and in the car with Arthur driving past where I once lived. Down Lawn and across School was how I had walked for all of my life; I had walked to where a far-below, mean-looking river dropped at my feet: Main Street, the original. Walked north, away from water and local business, Main Street was houses: Sloane’s and Doctor Humber’s and Miss Pearl’s — old, old Miss Pearl’s, with her pointy tongue for sewing, who crawled below my skirts and never pricked me. Her porch windows snapped in the cold; I heard them despite passing fast, and I ducked, not wanting to be seen in Uncle Billy’s gem-like car. I did not want my old block to see me. I was avoiding the scalded daughter with the patched-over face. Friends once, and friendless, we had walked far apart through the fields behind our houses on the small side streets.

“My street!” I called after, going Arthur’s way to school, airport, Arlette’s — wherever it was he was taking me.

“Pull over there,” I sometimes said rudely. “Park there and wait, Arthur. No one will see me. I just want to look.”

My old house, the original.

The window I looked through showed open doors and light from windows unseen, and I wondered what the rooms were like upstairs. Had the upstairs been emptied, too, and would I never again see our house?

TUCSON

UNCLE BILLY WAS GOING to the desert — again! We were all going to the desert, all except Arthur. And Arlette, too, was staying behind. Arlette was minding the lake house, the one Aunt Frances loved best. Aunt Frances did not like the desert. “I’m a snow bird,” she said; nevertheless, Aunt Frances packed. She ordered sleeveless shirts for me with my initials on the collars. Sleeveless shirts in March — imagine! “We were shucking off our winter coats; we were traveling light: “Good-bye, Arthur, (good-riddance, Arlette), good-bye.”

The desert was a vacation Uncle Billy paid for — no bargains, no deals — but here Uncle Billy hoped to make money, more money, unusually, of course, in the desert.

In the desert Uncle Billy carried a gun. The desert birds were a spring green or dirt color, I remember this, and Uncle Billy’s gun and the mountains and the trek we took after the Dutchman’s lost mine. I was ten — ten was my age when Mother left for good, and this sleep-over life began. I was sleeping at my Uncle Billy’s desert house that time we took the Dutchman’s trek, and I drank my water early, and Uncle Billy would not share his. He said, “Let that be a lesson to you, sweetie.”

I swam and swam in Uncle Billy’s pool.

I wrote to Arthur. I asked about the snow. I told him maybe I wouldn’t come back Spring after spring, I wrote this same message: I love it here. Maybe I won’t come back.

But Arthur was waiting in the car for me.

Arthur was waiting, was paid to be waiting to drive me from house to house, to Uncle Billy’s winter house and then to Arlette’s shack, to Nonna’s, Uncle Billy’s again, Nonna’s, Uncle Billy’s — Arthur was stoutly, conspicuously waiting for me, and I was embarrassed to be seen with him. Standing outside of the car, simply taking up my luggage, Arthur looked uglier than when even Mother left. His teeth, his nose. “Hello,” I said with a brushed-past hug. “Arthur,” I said, insisting on his name. I was ashamed of my cool behavior, yet I didn’t want anyone to see Arthur and to think he was my father. My father was handsome!

Arthur was waiting in the car for me; in front of school or after lessons, Arthur was waiting in Uncle Billy’s formal car, a blue-black, deep green, the same color as the stone Aunt Frances wore on her wedding-ring finger, a color stippled in the light, expensive.

Arthur called the car the Emerald Gem, and he washed the car weekly and dried it with a chamois. I helped.

I ran the chamois through the wringer and picked out gravel in the bristles of the brush.

Not much talking between us unless I asked, and I didn’t ask but came to conclusions from the way things looked. The way things looked made me think Arthur was sad, and I was sad for him. No immediate family, no friends, poor Arthur in overalls, smelling of oil and earth. His lace-up shoes had a bulbous toe, and the empty crown of his baseball cap stuck up stupidly. He swooped off the cap, saying, “Yes, Mister, Yes, Miss, Yes, Miss Frances” to the orders from the boss, to Uncle Billy or his wife. Arthur’s hair was sweated flat, his forehead grooved. Poor Arthur, left to do what I couldn’t do, he looked tired.

“Can’t I help?” I asked.

“No, stay where you are. You’re help just watching.”

“Can I come along then?”

“Okay,” Arthur said, and Uncle Billy said, too, but more often, “No, Alice, you stay here. …” And if I didn’t ride quietly, didn’t obey, what happened then? Banished to the backseat, obliged to sit and watch as they loaded Mother’s house on the U-Haul: her bed, a chest of drawers, six dining chairs, stacked. Arthur and his helpers were doing the work; Uncle Billy only bossed.

Shame, I felt, confusion, wonder, ease, the impression of a fire, a reddening light pulsed the shelter of leaves that branched across the road to Uncle Billy’s house. Arthur drove. Arthur was almost always driving or waiting and waiting, often for Uncle Billy, and with only a knife to pare his nails.

“Aren’t you bored?” I asked, yet another day, waiting in the Emerald Gem with Arthur and shivering despite the heat it hoarded. “Aren’t you bored? Because I am.” Hips passed and hems and scarf fringe and gloves, and I couldn’t see past the doors to the building, the one my Uncle Billy was in, the building with the doors revolving: not him, not him.

A Monday afternoon, a Thursday afternoon — any afternoon — it might be. Uncle Billy liked surprises and he liked to surprise, and he could! “An adventure!” he said, off to find gold or sausage or slot machines (really!) whatever he could find. Every day was his own, and Uncle Billy could be late.

“You must be patient,” Arthur said, which was fine, I thought, for a man dressed to wait in another man’s car, but I didn’t want to sit here without music. I didn’t want to wait with Arthur, and I was rude. I said, “Wait for me, too,” and I took off down the block on my own somewhere. Five minutes, ten, I wasn’t very long away — but still. …

“Has Alice been good?” Uncle Billy asked, returned and turned around to look at me while Arthur drove the three of us to someplace special where Uncle Billy flashed a card at a carpeted booth that let us in for free — for free the festooned aisles of giveaways and samples, tubs, birdbaths, rug shampoos, a new and faster way to cut up food. Big girls packed in dirndls held out dips and toothpicked weenies. Raffles, contests, questionnaires, there were baskets of possibilities only waiting to be signed, and Uncle Billy was smiling broadly. “A year’s worth of anything was something,” he was saying, but what would he have to buy?

“The chance to go to Orlando,” was what the nearest clipboard said, and Uncle Billy bought it. He was rich!

He bought Mexico City, too, and raffles for instant-retirement cash, a bird, a goat, a car called Windlass. A trip with my mother’s rich brother was never entirely boring. Brochures, calling cards, glo-pink logos, Uncle Billy bought guesses and drawings, and carelessly fetched for me whatever was free — for a pet I didn’t have or an ailment; but the cure spilled in the trunk and there were rolling pellets. “No more adventures, I think,” Arthur was saying to me, sponging off the dashboard and the armrests. “No more or we’re going to get in trouble with Aunt Frances. …”

The wet wind of Arthur’s seriousness, that could make me shiver; and Aunt Frances … and Arlette, too. They spoke in unison to me: “We know what you’ve been doing.” Then they put up what treasures I had from my mother’s, put up too high for me to reach. “Just ask,” Aunt Frances said. “You won’t even remember what’s here, I bet.” But I remembered, and I recognized Mother’s plates and glasses, the felt bags of silver Mother wrote to me about, “Don’t sell the silver. We can afford it.”

Mother wrote me at the beginning. “This is where I am,” and x’d on a card she had drawn was a beachfront high-rise, palm trees dashed in front of it.

Flowers in the folds of letters, “Smell these!”

Locks of new blond hair, “Wish you could see!”

I scorned what seemed flimsy for the cold we knew, what scant clothes Mother sent me. “Love, love, love, love,” Uncle Billy read, and he held out the package with its friable contents, its hankies of printed cloth.

“I’m not wearing this,” I said. “Whatever made her think I would?”

I was a prude then; I was easily embarrassed by my body and by my mother’s body and how she had exposed it — remember? When the yard was under snow? Mother, sunbathing on a bed of foil Arthur had built for her, a sun-box, Arthur’s homemade Florida, and Mother on her knees, waving to me — waving to the neighborhood! — her legs glossy and oiled and white, the sun invisibled in murk. “Look where I am!” Florida, Florida, no matter that we lived in the land-of-lakes state where spring was slow to come.

Arthur said to me, “No one could be happy the way she was.” He said, “No one in the family was as generous … remember that,” but I forgot.

ARTHUR

SOMETIMES WAITING IN THE car with Arthur, I was a loving child — or my idea of loving — and I told him that I wanted to stay at his house, not Uncle Billy’s, but Arthur’s house, above Uncle Billy’s garage. I wanted to stay for early supper when late light shot through water glasses to show up rims of dust we put our lips to. Disuse and absence, I saw it scumming unwashed jars full of greasy house-parts, and I felt sorry for Arthur when I visited him, and I believed that, left to stay over, I could make his evening easier, happier, less dingy — a child’s conceit.

Arthur’s house, although small, was oddly just as cold as Uncle Billy’s — even colder, I think — four rooms he warmed with the stove set to high and left open. The space heater he carried everywhere to plug near his feet. His feet! — those shapeless stockinged bags of stones, somehow Arthur walked on them.

“Is it time to go already?” I was anxiously asking because I did and I didn’t want to leave. No one was there to think he was my father, so I could love him as I might a father. I wanted Arthur to feel loved. I asked, “Is it time already? I want to stay.”

This much was true: I often wanted to visit Arthur, but Uncle Billy said no; and only sometimes, as when Uncle Billy and his wife were gone, could I spend afternoons with Arthur. (The nights were that nosy Arlette’s.) Then Arthur and I could forget Uncle Billy’s car — that jewel, that gem — and drive the truck around Uncle Billy’s estate or slosh the thaws in clattery galoshes: “Cold?” Arthur asking, and me saying, “Yes,” but walking on.

My hands were red and wet and cold that time we broke through dish-thin ice in our walk along the cornfield. Arthur was wearing his ear-flapped cap, of course, and a leathery coat with a quilted lining bright enough to see by when he asked, “Do you want me to give you a ride?” It was his tired body that he was offering, yet I took it. I rode him out beyond the breakage, beyond the tangle of flagged stalks and splintered ice. The sky lifted, turned black, grew stars. At his door, slipped off in the shape that I had been, I lifted my arms to him and said, “Again?”

I could be thoughtless.

MOTHER

ONCE IN A SNOW drift packed by plows come down my street, I made a snow car and sat in it for hours. Then I never went to school, or if I did, I forgot where I went and what I did there. My mother was my school and my distraction — the way she answered the door or did not answer the door but sat with just her legs crossed over the arms of the chair, and whatever she was wearing and the color or lack of color she had on her mouth and the voice she was using, such things changed every day, and I was met by someone new, sometimes with new company so instantly adoring. “Do you know how lucky you are to have such a mother?” they all of them said, and I knew what Mother had been doing — giving away again, performing. In an afternoon the boxes piled by the door with Mother saying, “And this, too, really,” then helping put on, talking as she did so, buttoning the new friend, “Yes, yes,” saying, “yes, this is you. You must take it,” giving away my father’s clothes and her clothes and my clothes — some favorites that still fit.

Mother’s hands were uncared for, carelessly used. She had tried to get through winter with one glove.

Arthur said, “When she was unhappy …,” but I knew, I knew, I knew what she did. My mother broke her body against the weather and overused the Florida Arthur had made, the foil-lined box where she lay winter-sunning herself sick.

Mother wasn’t always in her Florida box. One spring she straddled a chaise on the sunporch off her bedroom decorating straw bags with miniature fruits and flowers. Picnic-lidded, ordinary bags she turned into stories with dollhouse trinkets. Marion Van Hueval, Goldie Fleiss, Barbara Trapp, the Willis sisters, Mr. Horner for his wife, and all the girls in the Chester family ordered one of Mother’s bags. “Your nonna says it’s cheap to sell what I am doing.”

My mother, I thought, was an artist and could stack whatever was at hand to make a fluffed diversion. Once Mother emptied the pantry of fruits about to spoil and twisted them in greenery to decorate the Christmas mantle. Another year was a pink-flocked fir dressed in silver; the next, unflocked, done up in tartans and candy. Uncle Billy, Aunt Frances, Nonna, and her ancient cousins — whoever it was at whatever holiday party — waited to see what my mother would bring because always, always, she surprised them.

“Oh, Alice!” they said, protesting her extravagance but pleased to wear what she had bought them.

At the end, just before Mother and I were parted, the game was to follow her up the stairs when she was moving very fast and dragging behind her the falling-leaves coat in falling-leaf colors. Mother was dragging the coat up the stairs and saying, “Hurry. Before Arthur gets here, we can hide.” The attic, the wood bin, her foil-lined Florida, places occurred to me. Hide, then, but where and why from Arthur who expected us? I didn’t want to leave my mother, but I knew I had to leave her.

Mother had said into the phone, “I understand. We’re packed.” Mother had spoken to Uncle Billy although it was Arthur who came, who knocked on the door, who rang and called in, “Miss Alice?” We were at the foot of Mother’s unmade bed and listening to Arthur calling Mother gently, “Miss Alice? Miss Alice, the car’s outside warm.”

From the start I believed what Uncle Billy always told me, “Your mother only needs a rest.” But what home would there be for her to come home to, I wondered, and I kicked at the FOR SALE sign in the snow.

First I went to Uncle Billy’s house on the frozen lake, then the desert, Uncle Billy’s on the frozen lake again, in-between at Arlette’s, Arthur’s some afternoons, then Nonna’s for a long time.

“I get thirsty,” I explained to Aunt Frances, to Arlette, to Uncle Billy that time in the desert. “I won’t spill.”

But I spilled things that stained. I made a mess, a small disaster. I caused more than one woman to cry, “How could you! How could you when I asked you not to?”

Most often I was showing off, like that time I took the boy’s tire to ride in on the river when Arlette had said, “No riding in tires! I don’t care how good you can swim!” Arlette had warned me when suddenly I was spinning down the river. The tire valve was sharp against my back, but I didn’t care except to sit up higher, so that I could wave from the tire and not be seen as I felt I must be seen: a girl no one knew, a visitor falling through the hole of the tire — stupid, stupid! I was saved, of course; I did not become what I had hoped I might become. No streamy thing carried forward over cataracts, no mystery. I stayed a shapeless, wicked girl, clumsy, shy, easily embarrassed. I lived on and on, and I sometimes heard Arlette’s story of the day I nearly drowned.

Blah, blah, blah, Arlette was such a big talker.

May I? Do you mind? Do you mind if I? Could I? I was asking for something of everyone all the time.

I once spent an afternoon and an evening with a veiled crone — my father’s mother? — who lived on a pond in a bog of green sound: croaking frogs and crickets and brittle insects that broke like twigs. The doves made the most familiar music, and I was pacified to hear it and to see the birds so stilly perched. Yet they were common birds. The doves cooed unregarded, I thought, so I paid close attention to the doves; I made a point of looking at them. I believed then that any gesture I made was felt; I believed I could make the unhappy happy just by my attentions.

“I think you’re pretty,” I said with my fist around the money of a compliment, but the veiled crone asked, “Who taught you to lie like that?”

MOTHER

IN A PHOTOGRAPH I still can’t find, I am wearing Mother’s pin-wheel dress, so called because it twirled, and I am in mid-twirl in this dress and oversized sunglasses and high, high heels. My mouth is closed to hide my braces. I sent a copy of the picture, the only one I liked of me, to Mother. Later I sent others, but none as good; yet Mother didn’t even like the pin-wheel picture. She wrote, Your face looks like a pail of worms. Nevertheless, I went on wearing Mother’s clothes: the carumba! skirt and the Saint-Joan velvet, the bird hat, the Colbert glasses, all the quirky accessories, the dresses with names. Handmade one-of-a-kind was what Mother had left, unusual clothes worn unusual ways: sweaters inside-out and no adornment but a mouth.

More and more that was how Mother had worn her face — all mouth.

And I was all mouth — a big mouth, fat teeth, braces. A gabber, a blabber, a gossip. At ten, eleven, twelve, even older, I wanted everyone to know my story — to know it sharply, as one who rings the wounded might, with me, at the center, reciting: My father is dead, and I am only waiting for my mother to be well enough to take me away from these houses chapped by winter. Cold in Uncle Billy’s house, and I was rarely left to wander. “Read,” Aunt Frances said, or “Practice the piano, but softly.” I could scrutinize Uncle Billy’s collections, the glass cases of sprung-winged bugs, displays of shells, black and blue stones from isolate beaches — from Mother’s beach, perhaps, or wherever it was she was. The picture-postcards she sent were of bullfights, clock towers, sprigs of orange blossom. Mother was writing to me as I would to Arthur, remarking on the splendid weather, asking, “Don’t you have a decent picture of yourself?”

MOTHER

MOTHER KEPT THE PHOTO albums and gave Arthur the stereo. The silver was for me though there were pieces missing — asparagus tongs, toast holders, candlesnuffs, and coasters. The paintings, well, the paintings, the paintings she didn’t know. She hadn’t decided.

“I’m going to want them someday,” was what she had said.

In the end Mother left behind a lot of clothes; and Aunt Frances donated the best of them to school. The famous bird hat, several wigs, the shoes some Rick had bought her — fantastical — I saw them again in school plays. I saw the hat, and a boy I had a crush on wore the hair. Aunt Frances had said, “Your mother won’t see many parties where she is,” and Uncle Billy had agreed. Aunt Frances and Uncle Billy had always spoken in agreement on Mother. Sunday phone calls, for instance. Remember? “Are they doing you any good?” Aunt Frances asking, and Uncle Billy asking, too. “Do you think it’s helpful your mother hears you cry?”

“No,” was how I answered.

“Then why?”

I shrugged. I couldn’t always believe myself how much I missed my mother, but I did. It was tiring to be a guest, yet I was fearful to admit how I felt and kept saying, thank you, instead. I wanted to be agreeable. I wanted new clothes and I was often happy and happily dressed in cochina slippers and ruffled skirts. So what was there to cry about really—really? listened to the way Aunt Frances said, “How quiet it is now!” and I knew what she meant, how the day had purpose. The pot was on the boil and beading the hood of the stove; the smell was of food just now soft. Here was comfort: Aunt Frances’s kitchen. Here no food went bad but was fed to those masked scavengers, those silly raccoons. Uncle Billy put out scraps, and at his June party a bowl of champagne.

“What for?” Aunt Frances asked.

“Oh, just to see what might happen.”

On the night of Uncle Billy’s June party, the summer I was twelve and went away to camp, Uncle Billy said Mother might come home and might just want me back. What did I think about that?

I thought about how Mother would arrive — driving too fast and slamming the car door in a dust though the driveway was paved.

I thought about the speed of life with Mother and how, despite the uncertainty, the noise, the mess, the shame, her company was as big as the movies, and I missed her.

I was afraid, too. Here was often hard, but did I want wherever home would be with Mother?

The air then was coppery with music and from as far away as the far field where Arthur was parking cars, I could hear Uncle Billy’s June party.

Oh, let’s just steal this car and drive on! what I wanted to say to Arthur.

Sometimes the dream was: I steal the car with Mother. She is well, steady, the kind of woman she can be — has been, was on occasion — the kind who says, “This is how we get there”; and she gets us there; and we have not been long on the road. The mother, who is the mother I account my favorite person, has packed enough to drink so no one goes thirsty. In some dreams there is a lap robe — cashmere, which made sense — cashmere: It was all my mother wore in sweaters, also cashmere mittens, tams, scarves. “Hand it over now, dear, I’m freezing. But you like it?” Mother asked. “So wear it. You can have it. It looks better on you.” Such exchange as this was real; I didn’t dream it; I had heard it from Mother a lot of the time. Mother could be lavish, yet I told Arthur that she was not — no, never really had been giving.

“She was always thankful to me. Thankful for a nail. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Arthur. She cried over the suntan box I made her.”

Florida, where was it, I wondered, but nobody knew.

Some of Mother’s clothes I had seen. The staircase skirt, for instance, floor-length and swishy, the staircase skirt was used in lots of school plays with difficult women in them given to long, hurtful speeches. These women had trembling sensibilities; these women gripped handkerchiefs and vials and knives. They were dangerous and vacant. Their exorbitance drove the play. I know that woman was what I said when I first saw such a woman.

In life Mother had wept to leave me and she raised a bandaged arm to wave good-bye.

ARLETTE’S STORIES

“YOUR MOMMA HAD ONE of them wiener dogs,” Arlette said, “black, slick as a bean, yappy and scaredy — a little mean. His name was Bobbie, but your nonna called him Boobly — he was that stupid, still your daddy had bought him — so. So one day your momma forgets to close that fence Arthur put around the house, and Boobly takes off and into the neighbor’s yard and kills a momma cat and all her little kitties. That dog! He used to eat his own poo and you’d kiss him!”

MOTHER

“CAN I STAY WITH you?” was what I asked Arthur when I got to Uncle Billy’s house, and Arthur said no.

Arthur said, “It’s Uncle Billy’s.”

And the next night and the next night until I lost count of the nights I spent there in the house full of complete collections, sets and settings, hammered silver Christmas spoons and Dedham plates and books: a no-touch house. “Only look,” Aunt Frances said, and I looked.

“The dust!” Arlette cried, and my Aunt Frances cried, too, both of them with rags they slapped at books, yet Uncle Billy brought home more — more books, more figurines with china collars made to look like lace and sharp to touch.

“Don’t!” the women warned, unwrapping plates smeary with newsprint and cold from sitting in the trunk. Rhine wines, cordials, flute champagnes. Arthur was carrying in more boxes; they popped when slit open and exhaled. The women were unwrapping Mother’s house. That is what I saw on the table, plates I had eaten from. I knew the knife marks, the slashes made by Mother with her arms around my neck and cutting up my food from behind.

“More?” someone was asking in an astonished voice — more of just about anything anyone could think on shoes, salt-shakers, candlesnuffs.

Uncle Billy was promising more if I promised to be good, more souvenirs from wherever he was going if the requests he made were met. The requests he made were not too many: Use Kleenex, don’t snuffle; stop picking at your thumbs. Until I am back or while I am away was how Uncle Billy started. “I want you to be good.” His wife and Arlette and Arthur — all the help — heard him say, “I want you to be good, Alice. Do you hear me? Alice?”

I didn’t.

As soon as Uncle Billy was gone, Aunt Frances caught me at the cupboards, fining my thumb in Mother’s thumb-cut crystal glasses. “Snooping!” she said. “Your mother liked to snoop, too. Did you know that? Next time, ask.”

I was twelve when I swore I would never be like Mother although privately I still missed her very much. Once, I asked Arthur to drive me again to where she was, drive me in the jewel, my Uncle Billy’s car, that was emerald at night and took the light richly. Under the streetlights we were driving, under the downtown lights and the grayer, sidestreet lights; we drove through small-town darkness; and we were safe until we stopped at the town’s end, and I asked, “Would you? Would you take me again to the San? I’m not sure who I remember.”

Straight ahead was unused country.

Turned around we could also pass my street again and the entrance to school, but we were already late, and Arthur said, “I don’t want your Uncle Billy to worry.”

Arthur was a slave, I thought, with a slave’s point of view; but he said finally, “All right then, I’ll show you something.”

All ways were dark, but this way deeply. We only knew what things were as we passed them, dark stands of trees, rows of mailboxes, wooden markers, the start of hills — up, over, over and down — down a narrow, brambled road, as in a story, abruptly turning and traveling upwards again to a gawky house with finials, deep porches, churchy windows. Here was a spinster closed for winter. I couldn’t see inside although I tried.

“This was where your father came from,” Arthur said, and I was amazed. My father, the mysteriously dead and only ever whispered about — Arthur knew where Father came from.

I said, “You’ve been here from the beginning.”

On the occasions when Uncle Billy did the driving, we blurred past the countryside at speeds I wouldn’t look at with the numbers grown larger, long and skinny, wavery as numbers were supposed to be in dreams.

Uncle Billy said, “I’m in a hurry. Just tell me, can you see the FOR SALE sign? Should we send Arthur to shovel?” Uncle Billy asked me, but he answered himself. He said, “Yes, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll get Arthur onto it.”

Arthur found my mother’s missing glove in the shoveling. He used the sharp edge of the shovel on the ice to get it out, her glove — one of the last parts left of what had happened to Mother at her own house.

Mother wrote back from her Florida, “So you remembered making a snow car! I’m sorry I didn’t see it. Do you remember how we used to dance to the Spanish music?”

I remembered more than that. That was the winter Mother never left the house but waved at me from windows to come in. “Come in, please! Come in!” she called from the house, the one I put my mouth to. Lip-prints or breath against the mirrors and windows, in such ways I could taste myself and the loose-earth taste of the house. We conversed lovingly, the house and I. Everything was in its place and sensate and easily hurt. The front stairs often felt neglected, and the basement knew itself as ugly. “Whatever was empty or kicked or slammed shut wept. I heard my father’s closet mumbling.

I knew this house. I was there for the bird that flew in and scraped itself against the ceiling in its wild, bloody flight. “Get out! Get out! Get out, you fool!” Mother was crying, but the bird slammed against the wall and died.

I pointed out to Arthur where near the trees it had happened: Mother broke her nose and bled; but Arthur said what I saw was shadow. He said what I saw was leeched from fallen leaves, pinking snow. What I saw, he insisted, wasn’t blood.

“Your mother,” Arthur said, “was excited to go. She knew it was time to get better, and she urged me to drive fast.” Arthur laughed at himself, saying, “She didn’t really like to drive with me. Your mother said I was too slow, and I am. I have always minded the speed limits, but your mother likes to go faster.”

“I am just the opposite of her,” I said, almost shouting it over Arthur’s chipping at the ice with the shovel. So much noise for a long time — chalk-marks when he hit the sidewalk — my worried ears grew hot.

TUCSON

“WE NEVER TALKED VERY much, Arthur and I, but I was in the habit of kissing him good-bye, and I was twelve. My mother had always encouraged me to be affectionate and kiss — kiss friends, boyfriends, courtesy aunts, so that in the car, alone together, I kissed Arthur good-bye despite his ugliness, and I believed, and Mother must have believed, too, that such gestures made others happy, and sometimes I got carried away and kissed Arthur many times. Everyone likes to be kissed was Mother’s motto, and so I kissed him — eyebrow, forehead, nose — I kissed until Aunt Frances scolded I was too old to kiss the help like that.

But how old was I? Mother wrote she had lost track; sometimes I was two, other times I sounded forty.

“I am almost thirteen!” was what I said.

“Too old to wear braids,” Aunt Frances said. “We should cut your hair,” and she stood me in a tub and slopped a drape around my shoulders and cut me very short. She said, “If you hadn’t moved!”

Uncle Billy said, “It’s perfect for the desert,” and it was. It was easy swimmer’s hair I was wearing when I was swimming in Uncle Billy’s pool. On any desert spring night I liked to swim in the bath-warm pool, steam fogging the air where the light from the kitchen showed through. I could see them in the window, Uncle Billy and his wife passing, turned away from me. They must have thought by now I was in bed, but I was too old for such a bedtime. I liked to swim at night with not so much on as what even Mother had sent me — that stupid bikini! But now not a strap, not a bit of bandanna, I was just a body root-white in water and moving in a madcap dance, scissoring to get away from whatever danger I imagined, from kidnap or murder — but quietly moving, quietly. I did ballet: I stood on my hands and held my legs together straight for as long as I could.

“Are you watching?” Everyone asked this question of everyone else in the family.

I was swimming in my Uncle Billy’s pool at night while the people in charge were crossing overhead. In the daytime, sometimes watched, I heard them say to me, “That’s enough, Alice”—Alice, my name, after Mother—“that’s enough in the pool, Alice. It’s time to get out.”

“Why?” I said, “I don’t need anyone to watch me.”

Uncle Billy was about to leave. He was wearing his cowboy shirt with the pearl snap-buttons and khaki shorts and worn-out two-toned shoes — he was dressed to find the Dutchman’s mine in the Superstition Mountains. The jeep he drove was sufficiently supplied to prospect.

Uncle Billy asked, “Remember what I said, Alice?” He asked, “Don’t you want a treat when I come back? Can you be good?”

“But why do I?” I asked.

“Because you do,” Aunt Frances said, and she was giving other orders, too; she was directing the help, the nameless unreliables hired for the desert vacation. She was licking S&H stamps for gifts. She was washing the dust out of everyone’s socks herself! — rubbing the socks with a stone and saying, “Watch how you can make yourself useful, Alice.”

Aunt Frances spoke of money, of Uncle Billy’s, Nonna’s, and her own, but not my mother’s; what was left of my mother’s was knotted in trusts and Nonna was paying for me — didn’t I know that? Aunt Frances said, and said often, “Didn’t your mother teach you?” Simple economies and healthful ways. There were rules, manners. Made beds and sailing spoons. “Napkins first and last,” she said, “and the napkin ring is yours,” and so it was, handwrought and hammered, a gothic napkin ring with my mother’s name, which was also mine, Alice.

Alice, Alice, Alice, Alice!

“People who have spent their share of the family money are impossible,” Aunt Frances said, and I guessed she meant my mother.

Others had often said to Mother, “Where does it go, honey?” But Arthur defended her. “Your mother is generous,” he said. “She gives things away,” and then he told me again about the stereo, the Magnavox, that speakered coffin with pencil legs, the box with shifting sound. He told how, at the end, before she went away, Mother had given it to him, had said, “Arthur, I can see you want this. I can tell from the way you pet the lid, you want this thing.”

Arthur said, “I didn’t have any records or even a place to put it.” Like me, I thought, he wanted to see the long-playing records drop; he wanted to fall asleep to music. He said, “I don’t play music in the car because I don’t want to forget what I am doing. But the Magnavox is home-music at night. The Magnavox is different.”

I told Arthur that if the Magnavox had been mine to give, I would have given it to him. I said, “I would have.”

I would not have done the same for anyone else, certainly not the desert help Aunt Frances hired, the nameless unreliables who passed spring vacation talking to me, complaining. They said they saw me as a fellow-sufferer; they said they had seen me swimming at night. Was I as unhappy? they wanted to know; and they told me about the troubles they had had — and were having — they told me about the troubles with Aunt Frances especially. They asked, “How can you stand it?”

They said, “The socks, the heat, that bossy woman!” Afterward they stole from her whatever they could carry.

On such a night when I was swimming, I saw them both — those nameless unreliables, those live-ins, shouldering a lumpy bindle of embroidered cloth, saw them driving off with Aunt Frances’s TV in Uncle Billy’s jeep, heard them laughing. “We would take you,” they called out to me, “but we can’t wait.”

Aunt Frances was tapping my head with a spoon to say, You’re sailing, Alice.

But I insisted I hadn’t seen those unhappy unreliables back out; I knew nothing about it, their plan.

“Oh, come on,” Aunt Frances glared, “I’m not blind. I saw you talking to them. I can guess what was said.”

Aunt Frances was cruel, I thought, very rich but cruel, and Uncle Billy only sometimes took me with him on his jaunts and was forgetful and abrupt — as when he would not share his water in the desert on the trek. “Let that be a lesson to you, sweetie,” he had said, while Aunt Frances had said, “Don’t be so dramatic, Alice!”—when what did she know about thirsty?

“The reason we are rich,” Aunt Frances said, “is because I am frugal.”

Uncle Billy disagreed. He said, “The reason we are rich is because we are rich.”

I was poor and tangled.

“All the more reason to cut your hair very short,” Aunt Frances was saying. “You can walk through a dust devil and come out looking combed.”

It dried quickly, this hair, even in the cooler, nighttime air I walked through after swimming. I was almost always dry by the time I went to bed; and only a few strands, still wet and queerly bent against the pillow, would in the morning come out kinky. Nobody noticed. Aunt Frances was checking socks — was I wearing them?

“Why?”

Spring, spring, I was dreaming, dillydallying it was spring when Aunt Frances scolded, “We are back! This isn’t the desert! Put your shoes on!” She said, “We are back, and it is not spring here, not yet — maybe never. There’s still snow on the ground. Look and see.”

Dirty trails of snow were what I saw outside and the lawn, a thinning head of grass, a combed scalp — very muddy. Defeat was everywhere: dark shrubs, leathery and broken, and straw-dry plants on the shelves of the rocks, in shock, on end. The rocks were dripping tears yet nothing caught the light. Even the Emerald Gem was dulled: The mudflaps were muddy; the fender bumped up dust. Arthur was sick. His curtains above the garage were drawn; Aunt Frances sent Arlette with soup and sour bread.

“Why can’t I see him?” I wanted to know.

“Because you can’t,” was the reply.

Arthur was sick, recovering from something serious that they said was his heart.

His heart — I thought of how it beat behind its black hatch of threads, slow or fast, depending on the orders he was given.

“I have never been late,” Arthur had once told me. “I have never broken the law.”

Never broken a bone either or buried a wife. No children, no hobbies, but driving, driving well, knowing cars and roads and the town we lived in and agreeing every winter to plow the roads, deliver mail, play Santa at the firehouse for the firemen’s children.

“I get tired easy,” he had said to me — how many times? “I just want my feet up,” and in his house above the garage, I had seen him prop his feet on the ottoman and itch off his socks. His feet again! His feet were misshapen and shoe-marked, and I wondered had he stood on them when his heart attack happened, or was he found in the car, the car pulled over, the turn signal blinking—his heart, his heart. To think I had once let him carry me across the field with that heart!

Was it the size of him, was it that he was fat? Did ugliness have to do with it? Was his poor heart like the rest of him and poor, doing poorly, yet yielding to it, the crack in the wall that could bring down the house? Now that he knew where his death might come from would he run to it as Father had done?

FATHER

SURELY HAVING ASKED AS much of others, I must have asked this of my father, “Then can I go with you?” But my father, I was told, drove off alone, and he never came back, which is all the story I got, and no more from Arthur, who had said the field where my father was buried was farther north of where we lived.

My Aunt Frances said to me, “You were five years old when he died. You don’t know the man buried there. Even your Uncle Billy didn’t know him — and they were childhood friends!”

She said, “You can’t remember very much.”

But I remembered riding Father’s shoulders and fearing he would throw me off to feed whatever growled on the other side of the fence. I remembered being sick in his top-down car, the same he died in, stalled, adrift, moving off in rising waters broken up in spring; or that was what they told me: The waters took him. Those waters, rushed from the river that ran under Main Street, waters dark and skinny and mean, had swept away my father. Frantic waters moving out beyond the houses, the river was aflood whenever I was at the railing looking over, as my father had once helped me to do, lifting me to see the swell in spring. There was probably no way to guess how unhappy a man could be in the company of a child — and she, his daughter. There was no way of knowing what a man might yield to.

FATHER

I KNOW THIS: MY father loved my mother—a truth—and she went on loving him in a sentimental manner, polishing their wedding gifts and proffering me ashtrays initialed JCM. “You might enjoy this…,” Mother was saying and saying and handing me initials — his — on his silver napkin ring, a tumbler, highball glasses. Etchings of ducks, grasses, northern lakes, scenes done by an old family friend. I knew my father well this way, and I knew he was a dreamer, a capricious man shamefully departed. Mother took her old name back, making me one of them — Uncle Billy, Aunt Frances, we had the same last name: Fivey. I was my mother all over again. Alice Fivey.

ARTHUR

WAITING, WAITING, WAITING FOR an answer to Can I? “Can I see Arthur now that he’s come home?”

Time went by in the window where I waited for an answer and saw Arthur’s curtains move now that Arlette had gone to visit. Arlette, with unsalted soup and crackers, would she show him what the day was like now that the snow was melting? Could he hear the water rushing off the roof or the icicles in heavy falling, ice shards and scattered birds, a day of drastic reappraisals: Arthur is hot and he is cold; I cannot visit him and then I can, and later still, I cannot — he is only just recovering. He is sick.

“Besides, who said you could go outside in just those clothes?” Aunt Frances was roughing my feet with a towel, repeating, “Arthur will be tired for a long time,” and so sounding herself very tired. He would drive again, yes, she said, but the heavy work was done. The plow, the truck, the drywall rocks he liked to haul and lift and balance, work to outlast a man, such work, as had satisfied, was behind him. Gone the snow-night crossing when he carried me; Arthur was sick and would never be entirely well again.

Aunt Frances said, “Be quiet. That’s how you can help.”

ARTHUR

THE MUSIC, THE RUSHED-hush of cars passing, passing us on a dark road, cars speeding, making a noise as if to call out, “What’s the matter — you drunk?”

In a county full of straightaways, Arthur was too slow for where he lived. The cars passed by loudly, wrong speed. Arthur was amazed. Good citizen that he was, he did not drive over the limit while the other cars were sudden in their turns, wagging over gravel lots to get there faster. It might have been to home the cars were turning or to Friday-night fish fry when the cars bumped up behind us. The lights, swagged across the street and blinking, affected me like noise. The windshield was a rainbow, and I worried. “Can you see?” I asked. Snow was falling and the wipers streaked the glass. “Are you all right?” The way Arthur, now recovered, wore his good clothes carefully, ready to be buried, prompted me to ask, “Do you want to pull over and rest?” And we did; we parked near the school, on a dead-end street, and we slept in the car, and no one — no one in the long time we slept — passed by. I would have heard them; my ears were very sharp then. I could hear Arthur breathing in the half sleep to be had in the car, the one we both woke tired from and hungry. “But can you eat this?” I asked, breaking off squares of chocolate. “Could you have a reaction?”

“What was it about his heart, I wondered, when his hair was yet so black?

“Is it time already?”

“Do you have to leave now?” I had asked this of my mother, of Uncle Billy, of Arthur. Maybe even of my father I had asked as much, if I had known him, as once I must have known him: Father: side-part, bow tie, a voice radio-soothing when I thought of him. Now I had a car and rising water, a picture of a man driving willfully and fast. … which didn’t sound to me like him at all. If it wasn’t an accident, it could not have happened, which meant my father was alive and living somewhere.

“I have never been,” I said to my Uncle Billy; and “I have never been,” I answered that first time Uncle Billy asked if I would like to spend spring in the desert, “but I like to travel. I want to travel.” I made that known to them all, to the only living grandmother, even to such a grandmother as she, to Nonna, stroked speechless, I said what was purely true: “I want to see all of the country.”

I went to Tucson again. “While Arthur was at home with his trembling heart, I was riding horses. I was riding Patches in a stony river bed; I was swimming in the pool with Uncle Billy’s full attention.

“Aren’t you glad you kept your hair short?” Aunt Frances asked. “Would you like to go to town? Would you like to go to the cactus garden?” Every day promised some addition, more Apache tears for the tumbler, more stones for the jewelry we were making. Aunt Frances said, “I hope you know, Alice, that we love you.” Aunt Frances and Uncle Billy both said, “We love your mother, too. You believe that, don’t you?”

I didn’t. I was making rings with Apache tears. I was pulling clear glue like skin off my thumbs.

Poor thumbs, my mother’s, so evidently picked-at, sore. Her lipstick smeared on fast. One shoe, one earring, one glove, one of a pair always missing, she had said so a million years ago when I leaned under her crooked roof of arm, and she cried. Later she got mad; she threw an ashtray at Uncle Billy and rushed to hit him, and when he held her off, she ran to the glass porch doors and kicked in a pane and hobbled through the house tracking blood; but Mother wasn’t afraid of blood or of dying or that was how it had seemed to me when I saw her leaned up against the front-yard elm in just her negligee, and crying, “He left without me.”

Mother was so dramatic!

Mother was an embarrassment, a threat, a woman in a sweater dress and white bubble wig who had barged into Uncle Billy’s house with me, her daughter, a million years ago. I was along — was almost always along — on Mother’s sudden decisions to turn the car around and pay a visit. “What’s this I hear,” Mother had said that time at Uncle Billy’s when she was in the bubble wig. “What’s this you’re saying?” with no other greeting, “what’s all this I-can’t-take-care-of-my-daughter shit?” Then that time we were driving with Arthur in my Uncle Billy’s car, Mother had said it was true, Uncle Billy was right, she couldn’t take care of me — not without a man anyhow, and the men she was picking weren’t men. She was tired. She was sick of the snow. “Just look!” she said, and she pointed to fields of it washed against fences. We were driving in the Emerald Gem, passing shores of snow; and Mother, next to me, had her sad face on when she said, “You’ll like it in a warm place in the middle of winter.” Mother staring out the window at that hurtful brightness, saying, “Uncle Billy tells me the San has a beach — ha, ha. Now don’t you wish you were going there with me?” But I was going to live with Uncle Billy; and I was going to visit his springtime house, the one he had built in the Arizona desert. The desert in the spring was tonic, the early morning hours and the late, red afternoons. The rim of mountains just beyond his desert house turned all kinds of red, and I tried and tried to reach them. They were farther away than they looked, and the desert was hard to walk for its unevenness, its cactus. Jumping cholla threatened everywhere; but I walked it, walked heedlessly against the bleaching sun in the morning, or walked in the afternoon through the glaucous paloverde trees. I walked in the bed of a dry creek where the stones powdered beneath my feet, and I thought I was grinding bone. The clack, clack of loose stone. Heavy, heavy me!

On almost any day, I was on my way to the mountains grinding bone and singing my story. It was my hobo’s bindle. I carried it to anyone, to win friends and get attention from the teachers.

MOTHER

“OH, OH, OH, OH!” Mother, on our melodramatic visit, our only visit to see her, was crying to Aunt Frances, “Why do you…,” and her lashes were coming unglued, so that she pulled them off, and her eyes, I saw, poor, lashless eyes, looked palely small. Her perfume was too strong; she smelled sour. She sat on the couch, dragged off her yellowed bubble wig and shook her head in a dog’s kind of shudder, said don’t, said you don’t understand, said so much bad has happened. Mother scraped at her nails with her nails, which were also glued on; she took herself apart in front of Aunt Frances and me; she spoke of Father and the past.

“Why do you think?” Aunt Frances began.

The word custody was used, and Mother, I learned, had lost it.

“Oh, please.”

But Aunt Frances went on: “Who else was there?”

“You wrecked it,” Mother shouted.

“And that Walter?” she asked.

“I tried,” Mother said.

Mother was crying at Aunt Frances on that shameful visit, when I thought everyone, everyone must be looking at us. Mother, grown too fat for her dress, was crying and shouting at Aunt Frances, “Then where are all my beautiful, beautiful clothes?”

“I gave them to the school,” Aunt Frances said and told Mother how she had taken only the raggedy clothes, nothing very good.

In the serious plays, I had seen them — the good clothes, too — the falling-leaves coat in falling-leaf colors on a girl, just the ghost of my mother, pacing the stage, erratic and grand, saying, “We can afford it, surely!”

The cost of Mother’s flowers, I remembered; how the tulips, got in winter, stood up starched and clean as collars. Candles, candles — Mother had them burning everywhere after my father died. I remembered the candles and the Turkey-red carpeting, the nailheads in the leather seats. Everything was wrong for the town we lived in — not a neighbor knew what it meant, trompe l’oeil, though my mother had said it. Us, in the grocery, and stacking bloody wraps of meat. “Give me a million bucks,” Mother said, “I would know how to spend it.”

Mother had spent a lot of money on clothes, although many of the most expensive came from someone else. Walter had bought her the painted blouse, vines up the bodice, the Rapunzel shirt, she called it — light silk, easily ruffled.

Mother, I remember, in the Rapunzel shirt. Late May and the breeze made the garden blowzy — this way, that way — enthusiastic, and I could see straight-ahead to the pleasure of July, to the cut-grass green days of dewy midsummer. My mother could see it, too, days of it, from where we were sitting on the stoop together, she ruffled up in the Rapunzel shirt and the breeze that was blowing along Main, Lawn, School, White — our streets in the leafy splatter of late May noon light. I was happy, and it seemed to me that Mother was happy, too, in a purely quiet way — no talking.

Even when her company promised no pleasure, I went looking for my mother. She was, as often, looking for whichever man was making up her life. My mother made up a tramp’s sack of the silver and shouldered it to carry to a lover as a gift. I saw her leaving, and later, on the lawn, I stood where she might have stood, and I called after her.

“Remember my shoes?” Mother asked me when she had stopped crying and Aunt Frances had left the room on that one and only visit to the San. “My shoes in the yard with the leaves?”

I saw shoes, narrow and balletic and made in a material that stained. Strapped ankles, stubbed toes — from dancing? I wondered. Such shoes as these the terrible Walter caught up in a rake as easily as leaves and burned.

Nothing then, nothing held its shape but blew away.