Milk (17 page)

I knew by then, of course, that my mother wasn't going to write me postcards. I'd torn them down from the bulletin board and thrown them in the trash. Instead, I attempted automatic writing, hypnotizing myself first. My eyes half-closed, I wrote in shaky letters,
book, no, an, wha
, sort of like doing a Ouija Board; I tried to imagine it was my mother moving the pen, albeit slowly. Each letter from the alphabet took five minutes to form and most were unrecognizable. I tried a different approach and wrote anything that came to me.
I really like Brian, his locker is next to mine no no no my mother my mother what is there to say?
This became my diary, which remained after I'd quit all the other stuff. It said hardly anything about my mother and was mostly about boys.

This left dreams. In preparation each night I would picture her face and say her name, begging her to visit me in my dreams as she did when I was younger, when she'd return for a day and we'd go on a picnic and then she would say goodbye—always the same dream.

Instead, my dreams became sporadic and nightmarish, more like that other dream from childhood in which my mother had smiled, holding a knife behind her back.
I've got a surprise for you
. When I was fourteen, I dreamt my mother took me to a carnival. She grabbed my wrist and squeezed it tight, like a rubber band cutting off my circulation. No longer ageless or beautiful as she'd been in the dreams of old, she was drunk, her hair unkempt. “We're alike,” she hissed. “We're exactly alike.”

Two hours later, I'm still in my nightgown, embarrassed that I can't get dressed, can't go downstairs and fix myself a cup of tea at least from the ever-present pot of hot water in the Alta Vista's day room.

Everything at this moment seems unreal; rather, nothing is more real right now than my mother's presence, her pain. I don't want to be distracted from it. I want the feeling to stay, however desperate: my mother's hand brushing my cheek. Her hand on my throat. At least she's here, conjured up by a medical report, spread all over my bed at the Alta Vista. I tell myself it's an artifact, a document, a processed lie, not her at all, but there she is laid bare before me, discussed in terms that are at once too general and too specific. My mother with her wrists bound, one inflamed, infected; with this hand she touches me. And Charlotte? Thin white arm, a cry—I mourn her too.

Later, I throw on some clothes to go use the Alta Vista's pay phone outside. First I leave a message on Gregg's phone that I won't be able to see him for a few days. “I've got a lot of work to get caught up on,” I lie. “Call you in a few days. Miss you.”

Then I call Maggie.

“Theo?” Her voice sounds scratchy, far away. “I've been trying to call you. It's impossible reaching you there, when are you going to move out of that place? Anyway, I wanted to tell you about my mother. She died a couple of nights ago.”

“Maggie—”

“While you were out of town.”

“What did she die of?”

“Heart attack and a lifetime of drinking. Big surprise, right? You know what she used to do when I was little? She'd stand in the doorway to my room and hang onto the door—probably so she wouldn't fall over, she was so drunk. Just hung on to the door, staring at me, while my father beat the shit out of me.”

Maggie's father had died by the time we became friends, but I remember the way her mother used to stare at her, in doorways and elsewhere—with sick longing, as if she couldn't for the life of her figure out why Maggie had rejected her.

“How about if I come over?” I offer. “I'll pick up a movie for the boys, fix you some dinner—”

“Okay.” Her voice is low and keen. I can't imagine telling her or anyone else about my mother's hospital records.

S
EVENTEEN

Florences. Devoe, 66, of San Marino, died Tuesday, March 9, 1991, at Huntington Memorial Hospital.

Services will be at eleven a.m. Friday at St. Edmund's Episcopal Church in San Marino. Interment will be at the cemetery of Church of Our Savior in San Gabriel.

Mrs. Devoe was born August 3, 1928 in Los Angeles, the daughter of Henry and Eleanor Greer. She married Wyatt Devoe on June 12, 1946.

She was a homemaker and mother.

Her husband, Wyatt Devoe; preceded her in death. She is survived by a son, David Devoe of Manhattan Beach; a daughter, Margaret Matheson of Arcadia; and two grandsons, Dylan and William Matheson.

Memorial gifts may be made to St. Edmund's Church.

The morning of the funeral, I let my father know I won't be stopping by.

“I've nothing important—” He means I don't need to stop by. Always ready, even eager, for me to throw him over for something else, somebody else. I wonder if he's even aware of my mother's hospital records with their intimations of nervous breakdowns, alcoholism, and my father's own weakness and ineffectuality.

“Don't you want to know why I'm not stopping by, Dad?”

“It's not any of my business.”

“Oh, but it is. Remotely. Mrs. Devoe, Maggie's mother, died. Her funeral is this morning at St. Edmund's.”

“Oh! Well.”

“What do you mean
well?”

“That's a shame.” Naturally he doesn't ask about the cause of her death. If it were someone more conveniently distant, someone not the least bit related to us, he could ask, he could hint, he could gossip.
Was it her drinking?

“I thought you'd want to know, Dad. About the funeral.”

“You mean you're going?” At once scandalized and grateful—if I go, he won't have to.

“Isn't it obvious?” Because of the hospital records, I feel especially irritable today. “They're our relatives, aren't they, Dad? And Maggie's my friend.”

“You—still see her?” As if she still might lead me down a dark and forbidden path, although it was always questionable as to who was leading whom.

“As for being related to them,” my father quickly changes the subject, “well, yes. It's true but we don't—we haven't—” His stock explanation all the years of my life. “We never really communicated. We're related on your mother's—her father's—side.”

“I know how we're related. I just thought you'd want to know, Dad, about the funeral.”

“Yes, of course.” Back to being the good boy. “Please do convey my condolences.”

“I will.”

“I suppose I ought to write a note,” he adds, with considerably less enthusiasm.

“Whatever, Dad.”

After Maggie and I drop the boys at the sitter's—they never knew their grandmother well, Maggie explains; she'd decided it was best to avoid that situation—we drive to St. Edmund's.

“Church or chapel?” I ask as we speed down San Gabriel Boulevard.

“Chapel.”

We both smile a little sheepishly, remembering when we used to meet up after sneaking out of our bedroom windows for smokes. We'd smoke where the choir was supposed to sit, pulling up the corner of the carpet to stub out our smokes. If we were feeling guilty, we'd blow away the ashes, stick the butts in our back pockets; if not, we'd line the butts up along the tops of the prayer books and hymnals for the janitor to find. The chapel is also the site of my own mother's funeral, although I'm not sure Maggie knows this. I'm not sure what she knows about my mother or Charlotte, what I've told her. Suicide, crib death—not words one can work into most conversations gracefully. Even Maggie may not know the full truth, it's been so many years since we discussed it, back when we were teenagers.

One thing I'm certain of: Maggie doesn't know that after today, our mothers will be buried in the same place. The cemetery at Church of Our Savior, some miles from St. Edmund's.

This being the first Sunday of the month, we visited the cemetery, beforehand gathering a bouquet of flowers from our yard. Flowers my mother had loved: roses, Siberian iris, camellias, daisies. My father did the job himself, leaning into the shrubs still dressed in the white shirt he wore to church, jacket off now. I heard the snip of shears. He placed each flower into the basket I held; soon I would fill a jar with water at the kitchen sink, while in the next room bombs fell, rockets flared, men shook hands saying goodbye forever, their faces streaked with gunpowder, tears
—
Corb sprawled in front of the TV watching war movies
.

The flowers gathered, we climbed into the car, Corb in back and me in front with the flowers in their glass jar between my knees. “Would you not drive so fast, Daddy?” I complained. “I'm getting water on my dress.”

He apologized and drove fast anyway, feather-braking for stop signs, the way he always drove, as though roads were freeways. I'd never known my father to drive slowly, although he believed one should, gratefully accepting every speeding ticket he got. In the back seat Corb hung his elbow out the window, a bored expression on his face, in case we passed anyone he knew
—
who would never guess where we were going anyway
.

The cemetery at Church of Our Savior. Right next door was the church itself, where my mother had been baptized. Also “where your mother and I got married, you know,” as our father always pointed out, but just that fact alone, not about the wedding itself. We had the photo album for that, in it my mother beautiful, my father young and smiling; pictures of wedding silver displayed on long tables; my mother in her dressing room surrounded by bridesmaids; my mother in her slip holding a hand mirror
—
why, she was gorgeous, like a movie star
—
would I ever look like this?; my mother on her father's arm about to enter the church; the wedded couple leaving the church; then the reception, a sea of hats. Too many pictures of women in hats
—
my father's complaint. Hats! Festooned with birds, fruit, flowers, seed pearls, netting, ribbons. Driving past the church, I dreamed of hats, my mother's slip
.

We proceeded into the cemetery
—
the only place my father drove slowly, because of the speed bumps
—
and Corb was out of the car before it even stopped, throwing open my door, grabbing the jar of flowers and striding toward the two flat stones with our mother's and sister's names on them, next to the graves of our grandparents, and our mother's grandparents. Come on, Corb's motions seemed to say, let's get this over with. He wiped the stones with a rag he brought, blew off the grass. I wandered over with our father, pausing to ask dumb questions at the graves of young children who had died at the turn of the century; according to Corb, they were dumb. “Why would a baby die?” Our father gave the same long drawn-out explanation each time, about how children in the olden days weren't as healthy as you kids now
—
and then he would list the illnesses, diphtheria, scarlet fever, smallpox, influenza, consumption. I always listened for the name of our sister's disease, wondering what she had, why she had died. Only once did I get up the courage to ask: did Charlotte have diphtheria or influenza? No, my father said, looking as solemn as I'd ever seen him. Sometimes babies died, he said. Died in their sleep
.

Corb meanwhile dumped dead flowers into the trash, rinsing out the plastic vases that fit into the slots in the ground. He ripped open one of the two packets of sugar we brought to keep the new flowers fresh, pouring the other packet in his mouth when no one was looking. He put most of the flowers in our mother's vase, reserving a few daisies and a rosebud or a pink camellia for Charlotte's
.

“Done!” he called
.

My father would inspect Corb's work, nodding, murmuring his approval, but this wouldn't be the end. Now we checked on other family gravesites, some maiden aunts as well as our father's parents, in another section of the cemetery. Our paternal grandfather's headstone was cracked nearly in half; he had died a long time ago. I always studied my father's face for any sign of emotion as he gazed at the grave of his father. None that I could see. But his father had died of a sudden heart attack when my father was ten, and as I understood it, he had witnessed this, his father dying in front of him. We had this in common, then, losing a parent at a young age. What did my father feel? What did
I
feel, standing at my mother's grave?

Dry-eyed caution, like a catch in my throat. Excitement of a sort: so this was where my mother and sister lived, their home now
.

Back in the car, we drove through the rest of the graveyard, passing the long pink granite building where people were buried. Their ashes, that is. Small gold plaques all up and down the sides of the building, with tiny vases attached able to hold no more than a single flower. Each like a post office box. Marilyn Monroe, I believed, was buried in such a place, her tiny pile of ashes in, what, a jewel-encrusted box? Or a small metal locked box
—
that's where I pictured my mother's ashes to be, underground
.

Those who burned my mother's body wore gloves on their hands, aprons streaked with soot. Rolling her corpse inside like a loaf of bread they later forgot
.

One more stop, or pause rather, as we exited the cemetery at Church of Our Savior. Our father slowed the car. “See over there? By the trees? That's where our plots are.”

Not by our mother's or the rest of the family's, because there was no more room there, but off in some corner, and why was he buying funeral plots anyway? Did he expect us not to last either?

Our father explained: maybe we'd want to be buried some place else, with our own families we would have some day, next to a wife or husband. That was fine with him. He'd bought these plots just in case. It wasn't easy, he said with an apologetic laugh, to find a plot in a cemetery these days. It was a little like trying to find a parking space downtown
.