Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (3 page)

“Well, I don’t have Grandpa Gibson’s name.”

Dot put her cup down noisily. “Andrew, right?”

“Andrew James.”

“So, Andrew James Gibson and Mattie Lee.”

“Andrew James Gibson and Mattie Lee Garner. Now, that’s enough.”

I gathered up my papers and headed out the door. From the carport, I heard Aunt Dot’s booming laugh. “What you think? Should we get a family Bible?”

MY MAMA DIED AT MIDNIGHT ON A SATURDAY. My sister Anne was with her, holding her hands and trying to tell her we were on our way. My sister Wanda and I were miles away, lost in the parking garage at the Orlando airport. I had just flown in from Buffalo, shaking still with the effort of trying to make the plane go faster by sheer will.

“We have to hurry,” Wanda told me, and gave that bark of a laugh that meant nothing was funny. We ran. We dodged tourists and baggage handlers, squalling children and panhandlers for Jesus. “Get out of the way!” I yelled at a guy in a pale blue suit.

“No need to be rude, sister,” he said in a voice that any other day would have cut me to the quick.

In the parking garage we got lost. Wanda glared across the rows of economy vehicles, cursing, saying, “Damn, this doesn’t look right. Damn city growing so fast. Goddammit, this doesn’t look right.”

The elevator wasn’t working at all, and Wanda was only half sure we were in the right building. She kept shoving doors open, throwing herself into another staircase, and dragging me up another level, up three before she finally recognized the half-finished color coding.

“There!” she yelled. “Right there.” And I saw her Ford, recognizable at a glance by the tinted windows and the fuzz-buster duct-taped to the dash, parked sideways in its slot. I laughed then—at the car, at Wanda, at the comedy of it all, Wanda hiding her fear behind outrage while I could do nothing but shake my head and follow close behind.

After, I kept thinking that it must have been that moment when Mama reached to grab Anne’s hand for the last time, when her mouth—no longer speaking what her mind was seeing—began that soft wordless howl. Twenty minutes of howling and then silence, and death happening then like the closing of a book.

“You mean and stubborn and completely Ruth’s daughter,” Aunt Dot had told me when I visited her years ago and would not give her the gossip about Mama that she wanted. I had made a mantra of her words. “Mean and stubborn and Ruth’s daughter. I don’t hold grudges. I kick butt and keep moving. Mean and stubborn and Ruth Gibson’s daughter.” But what did that mean in a world without her? Who were Ruth Gibson’s daughters without her?

After the good-byes and the weeping, walking away from the hospital together, my sisters and I became other people. All through the funeral rituals, we acted as if we had become careful strangers. I imagined myself crisp and efficient, doing what seemed necessary, barely pausing to wipe the tears I could not stop. Anne walked silently through the motions, white-faced and wounded, though the air around her hummed and burned. It was Wanda, my big sister, who startled me, putting me down in her own bed, serving food I didn’t know she knew how to cook, teasing the relatives out of their animosity. She even got my uncle Brice to talk to my aunt Maudy and kept me carefully out of my stepfather’s reach.

At first I wasn’t sure what my sister was doing, but at the funeral home I began to understand. We had gone through Mama’s things together, talked about buying something special, but finally chosen clothes for Mama that she had worn and loved—her lucky shirt, loose-fitting cotton trousers, and her most comfortable shoes. “Only woman ever buried in her bingo outfit,” I would tell friends later. But choosing those clothes, we had not laughed; we had felt guided by what Mama would have wanted. It was when I watched Wanda fasten Mama’s lucky necklace—the little silver racehorse positioned in the hollow of Mama’s throat—chat I saw.

Wanda was being Mama, doing what Mama would have done, comforting us the way only Mama had known to do. I looked around and saw Anne holding my stepfather’s shoulder as he sobbed, looked down and saw my own hands locked on the little bag of Mama’s jewelry we had found in her dresser. For a moment I wanted to cry, and then I didn’t. Of all the things I had imagined, this was the one I had not foreseen. We had become Mama.

I reached past my sister to put my hand on Mama’s face, to touch her again and push away my sudden fear. But the cheek was hard and cold, something marble and inhuman. I did not know then what was more terrifying—what my mama had become or what we had.

 

 

We divided Mama’s things among us.

My sisters have daughters. I insisted they take all the jewelry to pass on, but it was no great gesture. My mama had nothing worth any money, only one good bracelet and one good ring that I pressed on Anne and Wanda. They insisted I take the engagement band. It was cold in my hand. I tucked it in a little satin bag in which Mama had kept three spools of thread, tiny plated scissors, needles, and a thimble. A month later, in Los Angeles to do a reading, I would lose the bag, the ring, all my clothes, and the manuscript I was completing. But when I told my sisters about it, all I thought was that the sewing bag was the only thing Mama had owned that I really wanted.

Then I remembered the pictures.

For two decades, every time I visited, I shuffled through those pictures—scores of ancient snapshots stuffed in a box in the end table in Mama’s living room. Each time I pulled them out and asked Mama to go through them with me. The faces in Mama’s box were full of stories—ongoing tragedies, great novels, secrets and mysteries and longings no one would ever know.

“Who’s this?” I would ask about another cracked and fading sepia image of a child.

“That was your cousin that drowned.”

“And this?”

“She was the one ran off at thirteen. Now, what was her name?”

It was the ones no one remembered who pulled at me. Two women with bright-faced toddlers on their laps bracketed a sullen adolescent girl. Her hair pinned up on the crown of her head. Theirs was long and loose. All had the same eyes, the same eyebrows.

“Didn’t she marry Bo?” Mama’s finger traced the smile of the woman on the left. “This is her girl beside her, and the babies they both had the same year.” Mama flattened her lips and touched the face of the girl on the side where it was obscured by a flaw in the print.

“Don’t think I ever knew the other daughter.” Her lips parted as if she were about to say something, but she stopped and gave a slight shake of her head.

“Were they the ones who died in the bridge accident?” I reached for the photograph, but Mama pulled it away.

“What accident?”

“The one Granny told me about.”

“Oh, you know your granny.”

“Then what did happen?”

Mama’s grip on the photograph tightened, the tips of her fingers going white while her mouth set in a thin hard line. “Nothing happened to them,” she said. “Nothing at all.”

Mama would touch the pictures tentatively, as if her memories were more real than the images, as if she did not want to look too hard at the reality of all those people lost and gone. Every time I asked, she promised that as soon as she found a spare moment, she would go through the box, sort through the photos, and write it all down, each name, each fate she could remember. Every time, seeing the way her hands moved on those snapshots, I knew it wasn’t likely that she would keep her promise.

Now spread across Wanda’s coffee table, they were as anonymous as they had been all my life. My aunt Bodine went through them, but she seemed to know as little as I. “Never met her; don’t think I knew him.”

There were a few she did know. “Oh, that’s your aunt Dot, your granny, and the boys, David and Dan. Your cousins Billie and Bobbie. Your uncle Brice, the handsome one, and this one’s him with his best friend died in the Korean War. Your mama at fifteen, I think, and this one at sixteen.”

 

 

My mother was beautiful, that hard thing, beautiful. Men wanted my mama, wanted her before she knew what it meant, when she was twelve, thirteen, still a child. She showed me once that snapshot of herself at fifteen; white socks and A-line skirt, hair in a Kitty Wells cloud, schoolgirl blouse, Peter Pan collar, and the most hesitant smile.

“Just a girl,” Mama said, shrugging. “I was just a girl.”

“Pregnant,” my aunt Dot told me, “carrying you then. That was taken just before she ran off with that silly boy.”

That beautiful boy my mama loved, as skinny as her, as ignorant and hungry, as proud as he could be to have that beautiful girl, her skin full of heat, her eyes full of hope. And when he ran away, left her to raise me alone, she never trusted any man again—but wanted to, wanted to so badly it ate the heart out of her.