Never Coming Back Page 14

  “You have? Like what?”

  “Like, um, like what baseball team you like.”

  Sunshine and Brown tensed. The air in the room changed. That was what tension did—it made the air still and solid, something you had to slice through to make progress. Baseball? was what their tension said. Really? That’s what you want to know about? You don’t even care about baseball.

  “Baseball?” Tamar said. “The Egyptian Whalebacks.”

  “What? Who?”

  That was Brown, swiveling on the couch to stare at her. She looked at him calmly.

  “Did you say the Egyptian Whalebacks?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ve never heard of them,” Brown said.

  “You have now,” Sunshine said, warning in her voice. Stay with her, Brown, was what the warning said. Don’t correct. Follow her.

  “Huh,” Brown said. “Where do the Whalebacks play?”

  “Egypt.”

  She frowned and gave him a poke in the ribs with her elbow, a where-else-would-they-play sort of poke, and I fought the urge to laugh. Brown was about to ask another question, but she poked him again.

  “Shut up now,” she said. “It’s time for the heinous adventures.”

  “Ma! Interviews. The heinous interviews.”

  Don’t correct. Don’t criticize. Sunshine next to me tensed again, because I had told her, hadn’t I, and hadn’t she written it down in her notebook, that “Don’t correct” was one of the cardinal rules? Tamar flapped her hand in my face: Go away! Shoo!

  But she was laughing. My mother, Tamar, a woman so serious all her life that her own daughter barely remembered her laughing, was laughing like a little girl. She flapped her free hand at the television and Brown started laughing too. Meet her where she is, Clara.

  “Here we go,” I said. “God help us all.”

  Trebek, wearing a navy suit, strode across the stage toward his victims. Philip, who according to Sunshine looked like he could be a marine, appeared to be visibly shrinking from the camera. Sunshine reached for my mother’s hand, a gesture she accepted, and from the corner of my eye I saw Brown, on her other side, pick up her other hand. Let the heinous adventures begin.

  Philip turned out to be a martial arts expert and teacher. An image of him in a white suit tied with a belt, brandishing traditional Asian weapons in front of a mirrored wall while little kids bowed and called him Sensei, appeared in my mind.

  “Did I call that one or what?” Sunshine said. “It’s all in the posture. You can always tell.”

  “You did not call that one at all,” Brown said. “You said he was a marine.”

  “Close enough. I still win.”

  “Shhh,” Tamar said, and they instantly obeyed.

  Philip had just received his Braiding Dad certificate from a three-hour hair-braiding workshop he had attended with his seven-year-old daughter. Philip had found the Braiding Dad class a more difficult endeavor than earning his second-degree belt.

  “Really?” Trebek said, which made the entire moment fall flat.

  “What a dipshit,” Tamar said.

  “Who, Ma?”

  “The dipshit.”

  She jabbed My Side of the Mountain in the direction of Trebek, the all-powerful Trebek, who would not try to make contestants look good. He would correct their pronunciation and their spelling, and when it came to the heinous interviews, they would all end up looking like fools.

  “You’re right,” I said, and she rolled her eyes. Of course she was right.

  Martina from Brooklyn often found herself eating fast-food cheeseburgers and high-fructose-corn-syrup snacks in front of her neighbors because “I’ve had it with organic, locally sourced food, Alex. Had it.” She fell into a certain category of contestant who tried to get chummy with Trebek. He cut her off midsentence and moved on to the lovely Julie from Delaware, who was the current high scorer and who, according to rumor, had once escaped a flood by using a child’s sledding saucer as a flotation device.

  “Is this true, Julie?”

  “It’s true. I pushed the saucer out a second-story window and then I, uh, I kept holding on to it until they rescued me.”

  “Isn’t that interesting!”

  “Dipshit,” Tamar said.

  * * *

  “She doesn’t actually seem that far gone to me,” Brown said.

  “‘Far gone,’ Brown?” Sunshine said. “Rude. But I kind of agree.”

  We were sitting in the Subaru in their driveway. Martina the Brooklyn cheeseburger-eater had come from behind in the final round and crushed pretty Julie the flood survivor, who had bet every penny on a wrong answer wrongly spelled. The three of us had walked Tamar back to her room and then poured ourselves Dixie cups of lemonade from the 24/7 juice station, drank them down and headed north.

  “It was a good night,” I said. “She was right there with us. Mostly, anyway.”

  “Does that change?” Sunshine said. “Visit to visit?”

  If they kept coming, even once in a while, they would see for themselves. The fog still came and went, but the day would come when it would be there permanently. If they kept coming, they would see that. The words if they kept coming scrolled across the bottom of my brain like subtitles and I wouldn’t let them out of my mouth, because then Sunshine and Brown might hear how much I wanted them to keep coming.

  But Brown leaned forward from the backseat and rested his chin on the headrest of my seat, the driver’s seat. “Can we come with you next time?” he said, and I nodded. Then the doors opened and they got out of the car, Sunshine pressing her hand against the windshield like a benediction, and into their house they disappeared.

  When I left them I passed the turnoff to the cabin and kept on going, hoping to calm my mind. Miles and miles in the dark, heading north, deeper into the Adirondacks. Two-lane road, high beams lighting the night, shiny animal eyes waiting in the ditch. A deer. A fox. A coyote.

  The only station was the oldies one, drifting in and out. All the songs of Tamar’s era, the songs I had grown up with. Every song that came on the radio, I knew, along with almost all the words, because Tamar used to put her albums on and sing along to them every weekend. Those songs burned themselves into my brain. What Asa had said about songs being everywhere, and everyone knowing them, was true.

  Clara, open the window. It’s late. You’re tired. Don’t get drowsy.

  My own voice inside my own head, telling me to be careful. I opened the driver’s side window and cold air rushed in. Trees rose up on either side of the road and the road stretched before me like a parted sea. “Peace Train” came drifting in on the airwaves and I was fifteen and Tamar was singing in the kitchen as she put her new electric can opener to work. Cat Stevens, long gone into his world of religion, something Tamar would never forgive him for.

  “What the hell’s wrong with that man?” she used to say. “A voice like that and songs like that and, poof, he just disappears?”

  “Cracklin’ Rosie” came drifting in along with an image of Tamar watering the zinnias, the giant ones she always planted on either side of the front steps. She held her thumb over the hose so that the water sparkled out on the red and pink and orange double-headed blossoms and they swayed on their thick stems. She swayed with them, belting it out. “Sweet Caroline” next, and I remembered coming down the stairs late one night—I couldn’t sleep—to see her lying on the floor, singing along to that song, the album cover, with Neil Diamond’s face looming up from it, propped against her bent knees.

  “Ma?”

  Even back then I could hear the scorn in my voice, and here in the car I heard it again. Tight and hard-edged and abrupt. The judgment of my seventeen-year-old self traveling through the decades, back to haunt me here in the dark night, dark mountains rising around the car and me.

  I remembered that she startled. The album fell out of her hands onto the floor next to her.

  “What?”

  “Um. What exactly is it that you’re doing?�
�

  I already knew what she was doing. She was singing, late at night in a quiet house, singing along to the songs she most loved. And what I was doing was trying to embarrass her into stopping. Send her into retreat, or come roaring out to do battle with me in the ongoing match. Angry Daughters for $400. But she did neither, did she? What she did, what my mother did, my young, young mother lying on the floor singing to the music she loved, was crumble into a ball right there on the floor and cry. More than cry. Wail. A cry so full of desolation that my heart leaped into overdrive then and there, pounding so fast that my eyes blurred and stars swam before them.

  Did I say I was sorry?

  Did I drop to my knees and start crying with her, out of shame?

  Did I bring her a washcloth and wipe away her tears, cover her with a blanket, comfort her?

  Did I talk to her about what was really going on inside me, the bewilderment and hurt after Asa broke up with me, the feeling that something had been lost, would stay lost forever, the panic and shame that had poisoned me from the night I had screamed those awful You’re a nothing words at her?

  Or, when she called my name in that choked voice of tears, did I turn and walk back upstairs and leave her there crying and then next morning in the kitchen not mention one word of what had transpired the night before? Mother, daughter. Tree, apple.

  Thirty miles were gone now between Sunshine and Brown’s house and the point at which the car and I were mindlessly driving north. I pulled over and did an about-face. If a deer leaps into the road ahead of you, don’t swerve. Keep going straight. That was a Tamar caution, repeated over and over when she was teaching me to drive. But I knew, and I had always known, that if a deer did leap into the road ahead of me, I wouldn’t keep going straight. I’d swerve.

  In the darkness I drove and drove. Closing in now on the bar, the bar that would be dark by now, the bartender and the tattooed server gone to the homes they lived in, wherever those homes might be. On this night, I was the one who was awake. A word girl, making her way through the parted seas.

  But the bar was still lit up. I slowed to a crawl. Through the big front window I saw the bartender behind the bar, washing it down with a rag. Both arms moved in unison, a practiced swirl of up and down. I inched past, barely moving, only my fog lights on. He couldn’t see me in the dark. I was safe. But he looked up anyway and stopped washing the bar, stood there without moving, as if he could see into the car, as if he knew a woman out there was watching him and wondering about him. I pressed my foot down on the gas and sped away.

  It was late, so late by the time I got back to the cabin, but I propped the little speaker on the window ledge and Jack and I sat on the front porch together listening to music. Emmylou sang about an orphan girl while the fairy lights twinkled from the sun they had stored up all day while I was gone. My mother’s voice sounded in my head: I always listened to you, Clara. My own voice sounded in my head: You know what kind of mother does that kind of thing? Your kind of mother. A nothing kind of mother. You’re a nothing. Dear Words by Winter, I am looking for words to write my mother. Dear Words by Winter, I am looking for words to resolve difficult issues with my mother, who is disappearing ahead of me down a road I can’t travel. Dear Words by Winter, I am searching for words to tell my mother how sorry I am.

  * * *

  One Wednesday night the Subaru and I turned left at the village green. The Twin Churches were lit up. They were always lit up on Wednesday night, because that was choir practice night. Annabelle Lee would be in the rehearsal room at this very moment, her arms spread wide, the baton in her hand. I knew this because I used to spy on the choristers—which is the word for choir members, plural—when I was a child. Down the hall from the church house I would sneak in the dark, past the Sunday-school rooms I had never entered, down the steps to the closed door of the rehearsal room, where I would press my head and listen.

  If you listen long enough, with your eyes closed, the voices of a choir become distinct. Not just when someone is singing a solo, but in general. What sounds like one voice from far away becomes many voices close up. I used to listen for my mother’s voice, pick it out of the crowd.

  It was 9:21 on the car dashboard. Choir practice was over. I watched as first the far-end hallway light went dark, then the near-end hallway light, then the church itself, with its stained-glass windows, and finally the light that illuminated the front steps. The church and its adjoining building transformed in an instant into dark hulks on this November night. Then the front door opened and the dark hulk of Annabelle Lee herself emerged. I got out of the car.

  “Who’s there,” she said. Her voice was a sharp command. Not a question.

  “Sorry, Annabelle. It’s just me.”

  “Clara? Is your mother ​—?”

  “She’s fine. I mean she’s not fine, but she’s not why I’m here.”

  Annabelle Lee was silent. The mass of her moved down the steps in the darkness and came toward me.

  “Can I ask you some things?”

  “Such as?”

  “Why did my mother always eat out of cans and jars?”

  Her sigh gusted out white in the dark air. She bent her head forward and rolled it back and forth, one hand massaging the back of her neck.

  “Follow me back to the trailer,” she said. She always called it “the trailer,” never “home” or “my trailer” or “my place.” “It’s too cold out here to be answering questions.”

  I parked behind the giant Impala. She held the door open and we went inside. I had Brown’s grid with me, the way I used to have a written-out list on a piece of scrap paper next to the phone when I was a reporter. It was comforting. It was a thing, a tangible thing in the midst of intangible talk. The kitchen seemed to be the only place Annabelle Lee occupied in her immaculate double-wide. It was full of light and music—the soundtrack to Hairspray, with the “You Can’t Stop the Beat” song having been set to repeat, apparently, the whole time Annabelle was at choir practice—and the smell of food, spaghetti and meatballs, so far as I could tell. Beyond the kitchen the living room and bedroom hallway stretched out dark and quiet.

  There was a pile of clean laundry on the kitchen table and Annabelle began folding it. She wasn’t someone who could sit still. She was like Sunshine that way; her hands had to be in motion, either conducting the choir or playing the piano or chopping vegetables or folding laundry. She was a precise folder: towels in thirds lengthwise, then thirds horizontally, so that no seams showed. Washcloths the same.

  “So,” I said, looking at the neat little grid in my hand. “Do you know why she always ate out of cans and jars?”

  “She didn’t. That only started after her mother passed. Her mother was an incredible cook. And when she died, Tamar gave up food. Real food, anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “God knows, Clara. Penance, maybe. She was angry at herself when her mother got cancer. Angry that she hadn’t pushed her harder to go to the doctor when she had symptoms. Or maybe it hurt, being in that kitchen without her mother. I don’t know. She wouldn’t talk about it.”

  I kept my eyes on the grid. You are gathering information, Clara, I told myself. That is all you are doing. You will think about the information later. Right now, you are a gatherer of knowledge.

  “Okay. Thank you. Do you know why my mother always went to choir practice but never sang in choir?”

  “Because your mother is not a churchwoman. She doesn’t believe in religion. She thinks it’s anti-women.”

  Anti-women, I jotted next to the question.

  “Why choir, then?”

  “Because she loves music. And me. Your mother is my best friend, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “Thank you. Next question. Was my mother a baseball fan?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  I jotted no next to baseball.

  “Next question. Did my mother tell Asa to break up with me?”

  I was trying to ambush her, but she just
looked at the list in my hand and frowned, as if the list had asked the question instead of me.

  “Did your mother tell Asa to break up with you? What the hell is wrong with you, Clara? Your mother loved Asa.”

  “Then what happened between them?”

  “Again, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The night before he broke up with me, they had a fight.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I waited, but she wouldn’t look at me and she didn’t say anything else. I sighed.

  “One last question, then. Why did she sell the house to the Amish and pack everything up and move herself into that place without telling me?”

  She looked at me in surprise, her hands smoothing one gathered corner of a fitted sheet into the opposite corner. “So that you wouldn’t have to,” she said, as if it were obvious.

  “But I told her I’d be back in a week. One week. Seven days. She couldn’t wait that long?”

  “It wasn’t a question of waiting that long, Clara. You told her seven days? Then that meant she had to be out in six.”

  “But why?” The sound of my voice was more exclamation mark than question mark. Annabelle Lee was more than a match for it, though. An Annabelle Lee exclamation mark was the Final Jeopardy! of exclamation marks, compared with the wimpy Daily Double of mine.

  “To save you the pain of it!” she thundered. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Clara! She’s your mother! You’re her daughter!”

  As if that were all she needed to say, and then I would understand. But I didn’t. Her hands smoothed the pile of folded sheets. She had folded the pillowcases in thirds and then thirds again too. No seams would show when it came to laundry at the trailer of Annabelle Lee. I imagined a closed cupboard door down that dark bedroom hallway and, behind it, stacks of perfectly folded towels and sheets.

  “We do what we can, Clara,” Annabelle said, as if she had read my mind. “When you’re someone like Tamar, and you don’t, you don’t”—she groped for the right words and an image of my mother rose up in my mind, my mother pushing her walker down endless halls in search of me—“you’re not a person who opens up easily, you’re someone who maybe doesn’t know how to talk to her daughter easily ​—”