What We Keep (21 page)

Sharla and I were up in our old bedroom talking about cars; her husband wanted to buy a classic, a blue-and-white ’55 Chevrolet. I said I thought that’s what we used to have, and Sharla said she thought we had a DeSoto. I said no, I was sure it was a Chevrolet. We went into the attic to get the scrapbooks to check—somewhere in there were pictures with the car in the background.

We settled down next to a big cardboard box full of scrapbooks, dug through photos of Sharla and me with
our children, at our weddings, at our college graduations, at our high-school graduations. Finally we reached the period we were looking for and found photos of the car—I was right, it was a Chevrolet. We also found pictures of our mother, which we looked at together. We said very little about them, then or afterward.

I remember Sharla looked at one picture of our family taken by some grandparent or another. It was Thanksgiving, 1955, so many years ago. She looked at it for a long time. Then she passed it to me, saying, her voice a bit thick, “Huh. I guess she was really beautiful, wasn’t she?”

I looked at the picture, at the old monogrammed tablecloth, the sparkling dishes, the huge turkey, my father’s smile, Sharla’s and my neat braids—then, finally, at our mother. And she was beautiful.

“I didn’t notice, then, how pretty she was,” Sharla said. She was speaking quietly, as though we were in a chapel.

“Kids don’t.” I looked at the photo again, then said, “But look at
how
she’s sitting.”

“What? You mean at the end of the line?”

Our mother was seated at the end of the four of us. First came me, then Sharla, then our father, then our mother.

“No, I mean look how far away from the rest of us she is.” While the rest of us were touching shoulders, there were a good six inches between my father and my mother.

We looked again at the other photos. Whenever my mother was with Sharla or me, or both of us together, she
was close to us, touching us. When it was the whole family, or just her and my father, there was that distance.

There is one movie of our family around that time. It was taken by a man who worked with my father, Joe Valsalvez. He’d bought a movie camera, was thrilled with it, and volunteered to film our family as a gift to my father. The footage of my mother shows her at the kitchen sink. Joe had crept up on her—I remember we all snuck up with him. In the film, she jumps, turns quickly toward us, then starts smiling and wiping at her face. “Onions,” she mouths, pointing into the sink. I remember she was answering my father, who had asked, with some embarrassment, why she was crying.

I remember Joe saying loudly, “Oh yeah, my wife, she peels onions, we got a flood! You gotta get a
boat
to get her out of the kitchen!”

I remember something else. It was not onions she was peeling. It was apples, for a pie. I had been in the kitchen with her shortly before Joe started filming. I had seen. We watched that movie only once, borrowed Joe’s equipment to do it. The black-and-white images rolled by, you heard the hum from the projector, the tiny clicks of the reel turning. You saw the dust moats float in the steady beam that was directed toward the screen. You saw my mother wipe her face with her apron, smile, and lie. I never called her on it, either. Not then.

I
n December, a month after we’d last seen her, our mother called around eight o’clock in the evening to tell us she was back in town. She spoke to all of us: first my father, then Sharla, then me. She was living alone in an apartment on Bradley Street, about three miles away from our house. Sharla and I often biked down that street; we thought it was populated only by old people; thought, in fact, that being old was a prerequisite for living there, since we had never seen any other kind of person for the entire three blocks that the street ran. We had always liked watching the residents: women in saggy-bosomed housedresses and loose-weave cardigans; men in pants that fit like elephant skin, their shirts buttoned up to the top, even on the warmest days. We made up lives for them: she was a former beauty queen who became an alcoholic; he was a banker who had lived in a mansion with ghosts.

You could see Bradley Street residents climbing slowly up their outside steps, carrying net bags with miniature loads of groceries: soup, Lipton tea, cans of tuna. You could see them marching purposefully down the sidewalk for their daily “constitutionals,” their canes tapping. In the winter, they sat before their front-room windows in dark upholstered armchairs beside equally
dark draperies, watching for action on the street; in the summer, they came out to sit on their little screened porches and drink lemonade from tall, sweating glasses. Sometimes, especially when Sharla and I were younger, we would stop and talk for a while, sit cross-legged on this porch floor or that and share with the old folks the uninteresting cookies they seemed to favor.

I could not imagine my mother living on that street, but when it was my turn to talk to her, she assured me she was. “But
where?
” I asked, thinking I must have missed seeing something on that street, some dwelling that might more accurately represent her.

“Number forty-six,” she said. “Right in the middle of the block. It’s the building that always has red tulips in front every spring.”

“Oh,” I said.

“You know which one I mean?”

“Yes.” I couldn’t understand what was she doing there, why she was in that apartment and not in her house. And yet I did not exactly want her home anymore. I did not miss her in the old way: what had felt raw and urgent had changed into something dull and distant—and protected, like the soft essence of a mussel. In many ways she felt less like my mother than some faraway relative whose rare visits brought mostly a guilty discomfort.

I pulled at the phone cord, jiggled my foot restlessly, turned around to look for Sharla or my father. They had left the room.

“Will you come and see me tomorrow?” my mother asked.

I had no idea what to say. I wondered if she had
asked my father and my sister, too, wondered what they had said.

Finally, “I don’t know,” I said.

“You don’t
know?
”

“No.”

“Well. Why don’t you think about it, all right? I’d like you and Sharla to come over after school. Just for a bit. So we can talk.”

I said nothing.

“Ginny?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you hear me?”

“I have to go,” I said.

She sighed. “All right. Put your father back on, will you?”

I laid the phone down, called him. He came into the room and picked up the receiver, but did not speak right away. Instead, he looked at me, trying to assess the expression on my face. I made myself crack the smallest of smiles to tell him I was all right. At that point he said hello, but he was still not present to my mother—I heard it in his voice: his mild, floating syllables, his ultimate disregard. He might have been talking to someone soliciting a subscription to an unwanted magazine.

I remembered him sweeping up a broken glass in the kitchen the day before, funneling the shards into the dustpan while his face was raised toward me, talking. The damage was forgotten before it was gone. I remembered, too, his receiving a phone call from a pleasant-voiced woman last night, and how content he had seemed afterward. “Who was that?” I’d asked. He’d put
his hand on top of my head, tousled my hair lightly. “Friend,” he’d said, in a playful whisper.

I went to find Sharla.

She was standing in our bedroom, looking out the window, her hands in her back pockets. When I came in, she turned around and spoke angrily. “We
have
to go and see her, can you believe that?”

“Who said?”

“Dad.”

Actually, I was relieved.

I had read the first few letters my mother sent almost daily; then I began throwing them away unopened. They made no sense to me, what with their talk about her soul, her “growth,” the light of truth. And they frightened me. I wanted to relax into a new life that was working out well enough and that did not include her. Our father had lost the pain and bewilderment in his eyes; last Saturday, he had hummed the whole time he made breakfast, and he had made French toast, which he served with strawberries. Yet now I wanted very much to see my mother. It felt programmed into me, a reflex as unstoppable as a blink.

“We’ll be together when we see her,” I told Sharla. But it was more a question than a statement.

“Of course!” Sharla said. “Do you think he’d let us see her alone? She’s dangerous!”

I sat on my bed, scratched at the side of my neck, considered this. My mother had picked out the bedspread I was sitting on. I tried to envision her doing this, standing in Monroe’s and sorting through the selections, her pocketbook dangling from her arm. When a figure came into focus, I realized I was not seeing the woman who had last been in my bedroom, begging me to try to
understand something. I was seeing someone else, someone who had disappeared from my life as surely as if she had drowned. At that moment, I understood that the person who had so carefully deliberated over this bedspread was never coming back; she was, for all intents and purposes, dead. I shivered, pulled my covers down, and got under them without removing my shoes. Sharla watched me, didn’t say a word. Which meant, I decided, that she knew exactly what I was thinking. And agreed.

“It smells like
pee
in here,” Sharla whispered. It was six-thirty in the evening; we were in the hallway of our mother’s apartment building. Our father had dropped us off, telling us he’d be back in an hour.

“That’s not pee,” I said.

“Cat pee, I mean.”

“It’s not cat pee, either. It’s medicine.”

“How do you know?” Sharla scoffed.

“I just do. It’s Vicks VapoRub.”

Sharla sniffed the air again. “Oh. Right. I hate that smell.”

I didn’t. My mother was a great believer in Vicks. Whenever we had colds, she would slather it on our chests at night. I grew to love the smell of it, even the stickiness, believing that it was a cure made manifest: so long as my pajama top adhered to my chest, something was working hard to bring me back to normal.

“What number is it again?” Sharla asked, but the answer was unnecessary; at that moment, our mother opened a door a few feet away.

She was dressed in one of her housedresses, the lemon
yellow one, freshly ironed and stiff at the collar. Her hair was neatly styled; she wore red lipstick and small gold earrings. But her hands were clasped too tightly and she bit absentmindedly at her lip: she was not really put together at all. And when we got closer, I could see that her eyes were red-rimmed; she’d been crying. This annoyed me. Why did we have to come over if all she was going to do was cry?

She embraced me, then Sharla, then gestured toward her open door, saying, “Go right in.” And then quickly, laughing, “Well, I hardly need to say that, do I? This is your place, too.”

I felt my mouth open in outraged wonder. But I closed it again, said nothing. I didn’t have to, because Sharla said loudly, “What are you
talking
about?”

My mother put her finger to her lips, closed the door, leaned against it. “I just mean”—she smiled, waved her arm vaguely toward the small apartment—“that you are as welcome here as in your own house. It really is your place, too.”

Silence.

“Well,” she said, finally. “Come with me, let me show you something.”

Our mother led us down a small, dark hall to a bedroom at the back of the apartment. There were two twin beds there, with barely enough room to walk between them. There was a small dresser, leaning slightly to the left, but decorated beautifully with painted flowers. A small lamp was on the dresser, turned on, and the effect was cozy. On the wall was a small canvas, a painting of a chair in front of a window. It reminded me of the chair my mother sat in at home, but this chair had an ethereal
glow, and in the window behind, winding around the wooden rails of a balcony, were flowers the likes of which I’d never seen: shapes like stars, like shells from the ocean. The leaves were veined with thread-thin lines the color of blood.

“Did you paint that?” I asked, my voice a tight bundle in my throat. But I already knew the answer.

“Yes,” she said. “And the dresser, too.” Then, more tentatively, “Do you like it?”

I shrugged. “I guess. What is that a painting of, anyway? Where is it?”

“It’s in my head,” she said. “My imagination.”

“We’re not going to sleep here,” Sharla said, suddenly.

“Well, not tonight,” my mother said.

“Not ever.”

My mother turned toward Sharla. “It’s just
here,
” she said. “I just wanted to show you that. You have a room here.” They stared at each other, neither softening. Finally, my mother said, “Now I’ll show you the rest of the place.”

“We saw it,” Sharla said. It was true: the place was small; we had seen everything on the way to our bedroom. Still, my mother led us on a determined tour. “This is the bathroom,” she said. I nodded. Sharla, still angry, would not look at the rag rug on the floor, the pink shower curtain, the bar of Ivory soap emitting the comforting, familiar smell.

“My bedroom,” she said, turning on the light and standing aside. It was smaller than ours, I saw; there was room for only a bed and small nightstand. There were books piled on top of the nightstand, thin ones, colored burgundy, navy, and mustard. The little kitchen, which
she brought us to next, had a scarred round table in the corner, a few dishes behind cabinet doors made of glass. An embroidered dishcloth hung on the stove handle: flowers in a basket. “You like those, don’t you?” my mother asked me when she saw me looking at it, smiling in a way that I thought conveyed misplaced pride.

“What, the flowers?”

“Yes, embroidery.”

I shrugged. I only used to. She was not keeping up with us.

The living room, with its three large windows abutting each other and looking out onto the street, was the only room that had any natural light; still, my mother had the single floor lamp turned on. The only furniture was a large green sofa, its cushions nearly U-shaped, which was pushed against the windows. A well-worn burgundy rug on the floor emitted a faint smell of mothballs.