I looked at her, thanked her. I creased it, said that if I did … see her folks, I’d surely be in touch. I said I was grateful for the advice of her story. She smiled, seemed tired again, went back to organizing her one battered case. She noticed my concerned look at her grayed clothes. “I am a tidy person.” She touched the folded things. “It’s just … I wash these out with the soap in railway lavatories. Their soap’s harsh to start with, then they dilute it. I have found a clever way of hanging things up to dry on a moving train—but then, you see, you risk the soot. I’ve finally faced it: You can’t keep clean. You can’t keep clean in transit.”
Then she smiled, then shrugged. I walked out.
I eased on home, my neck feeling stiff, like from a long trip. I took off my good shoes, went barefoot. Sidewalks felt dewy, road’s tar felt smooth as suede. Dawn was just happening by accident again. Why does dawn always look like a secret, some shock, sort of a accomplishment? Every sunrise is walled off by the dark, from like company. Maybe each believes it is the very first. Our town looked like a rosy tour of itself, news again.
I passed that elm and, in the breeze, saw a blue blanket moving, drooping off the tree-house platform. I listened hard and thought I could hear the two boys breathing. Asleep as only eleven-year-olds (outdoors with a friend on a weekend night) can sleep. It pleased me. I imagined their shouting down, “How was Florida?” I invented answers. I considered smoking my cigarette but needed a light. I’ve never bought any kind of matches but the kitchen ones.
I let myself in and found Castalia dozing at the table, one of Baby’s moving-picture magazines open before her. She looked handsome spread there, her precious coat almost alive as company on the chair opposite, her twin. I felt grateful how earlier, when I’d told her what I planned, she hadn’t tried to talk me out of it, just sighed, nodded the onct. Now I touched her shoulder, she looked up surprised, then she grabbed and kissed my palm, said just, “Knew it.” Without a word, I give Cassie twenty dollars of my trainfare (maybe partly as a bribe to keep quiet, not that she wouldn’t). She shoved it back, I poked it in the deep pocket of her mink, then I sent her on home to her children.
I started making cinnamon toast for eight. I knew the smell would lure them downstairs early. Because of the sugar, plus the value I placed on their first teeth, I’d usually only do cinnamon toast twice a year. “How’d you sleep?” I asked my first ones to trail in towards the spice-and-butter smell. Kids arrived in groups or singly, rubbing their eyes, smelling of a bitter metal smell, footed pajamas scuffing. Sleep for them is taxing, they do it so hard. I heard Ned’s cane on the stairs and tip-tapping along the hall baseboard and the sound made me feel as wonderful as I’d felt terrible before. At least it was still him, you know? Alive and mine. Seated at table, all the children appeared fresh to me, like I’d been away a long long time. I felt myself regain—in one long greedy look—everything I’d sacrificed by leaving them. “Like logs,” come their standard reply.
“How’d you sleep, Momma?” Lou asked, taking rag rollers from Baby’s hair.
“Like there was no tomorrow,” says I. She nodded but asked if it was cold in here to me. “Not specially,” I told her when she looked me over. See, I was still in my good suit, even had the hat on. Near the stove, my tight shoes rested. The honeymoon satchel looked full and floppy, collapsed.
I unpinned my hat, touched the back of my hair. Nobody would ever know. In this at least, I was spared feeling ashamed. I studied them eating—each did it in a peculiar way. Baby nibbled cinnamon toast from the soft best inside out. Others came from all four corners inwards. Ned holding his with both hands now, did circles left to right. The twins chomped every which a ways. Lou, helping others, let her own get cool, then bit in perfect side-by-side squares like a mother’s spelling champ would eat.
And standing, barefoot, my arms crossed, overdressed for here—I saw that your Lucy here, why she didn’t want to murder nobody anymore. Not even him. For six or eight weeks, I felt better. Not exactly great, mind you, but better. My own true geographic self again.
Was in the ninth week, I found that—finally—I could.
This I’ve told you is how I got ready to run away from home. My first try had been good practice. Then I was ready to leave.
2
BUT with them. All eight. You didn’t think I’d abandon a blind child and them darling cranky others, did you? The person, she might consider it, but when it comes to the very departure minute, she saw she couldn’t. Cap, back from the good-time Norfolk hog fest, was now off to one in Richmond. Good timing. The kids were excited. I’d sent notes to school, our excuse? “A outing.” True, I wanted to save myself. A person does. But that self had grown so root-bound tangled with these babies, semi-babies, plus my weedy half-growns. How could I live, separate?
They were either at school or in the yard and I was up in the dorms sorting their going-away things into piles. I’d told them: One summer and one fall outfit apiece, one toy, plus a hairbrush per three. Tidy. Baby’d asked if we’d stay overnight in a “vine-colored cottage.” I’d said, “How many times I got to tell you: vine-covered cottage.’” Come a knocking now at our front door, scared me good. In Falls nobody knocks. If they know you good enough to visit at all, they come on in, and if they’re nervous about walking into your rooms, they yell “Woooo?” for politeness. Captain’s timing, as usual, proved awful.
A telegram: “Possible stroke of yr. Husbd. Hospitalized Richmond Livestock Convention. Not that oriented.” I tipped the boy a dime and then a quarter. I stood here, one of the twins’ corduroy rompers in my hand. I wondered where I’d planned going. To Winona’s vine-colored Riding Academy maybe? Would she take in me and mine—as her cleaners, yard help? Local travel. Real local.
I hired a high school girl to move in with my brood whilst I took a train north to see how bad it was. My husband hadn’t known me by telephone. Cassie acted insulted at my choosing this girl, not imposing on her. But I saw that as a tribute to my friendship with Miss Cassie Marsden. I was done with assuming stuff. You can’t just assume where a friend’s help’s concerned.
When Ned got hurt, I learned driving. Now Cap was stricken and I hopped a train like some professional gal in the movies. Tough, but kind underneath. Riding north, I felt mixed, so mixed I got lulled neutral. I arrived there weirdly relaxed and determined. I took a taxi, glad for my recent visit to Lolly’s. It all reminded me of that rough trip to see my son in the Wilmington Hospital. Only this was easier. My old man looked rested and I felt I looked good, too. But Captain couldn’t notice that in me. I took his hand. “They hurt my mother,” he said, almost cheerful, information. “Yes, they did.”
I was glad he recalled that much. “Know who I am, sugar?”
He took a while to focus on the question and then me. He nodded, smiling behind this sudden catlike spread of whiskers.
“Who am I?” I pressed, thinking he’d give me some advice, like Mrs. Williams’. I had his mammoth hand and squeezed it. Other robed men scuffed around the ward, watching, jaded. “Who?” I bent near the father of my children. “Who am I then?”
He tilted back into the pillow and closed his white lashes and said very tired but very grand, “You’re a little girl. You’re a little girl I’m responsible for but, the curious part is, I can’t remember your name.”
I stood here, considering weeping, mixed, mixed up. Then something in the ward’s decor—framed infantry coat of arms, crossed rifles—made me coach him. “Tell me about Simon’s pocket watch. Private Simon P. Utt.”
First I thought he would be sick. He leaned forward and, like some epileptic released into the joy and necessity of a perfect lavish fit, half yelled, drawing the attendant black man, “They’d get too close. You’d tell them to stay back. They wouldn’t. You saw they had their muskets ready. Officers forced you to or maybe knowing all your friends were watching. Maybe just the scariness of another body rushing over the hill at you. You could see their faces …”
/> The attendant, who reminded me of Jerome—now I think on it—he come up and touched my shoulder. We both stood watching this man with the white beard nearbout hollering a story no soul here knew quite how to take. Sounded memorized. Sounded acted.
I turned to this young man in starched whites. “I think I’m going to want to see his doctors.”
“You the daughter?”
“No.” I shook my head. “But he’s a old man I’m responsible for.”
Then it was nine children and not eight. And you know? it was better.
Poppa had been fronting me some cash to keep eight kids and one old bedridden gent in shoes and sandwiches. I had a brainstorm one morning, straightening Cap’s bedside tabletop. I took his pound of keys to the home of a black man who’d long worked at the livery stable. “And what’s this to?” I found myself asking. And was being told that Captain still paid rent on his dead mother’s boardinghouse rooms. No wonder we were broke. He’d paid for Cassie’s home. He owned Winona’s abandoned digs and here he’d kept Lady More Marsden’s rooms for sentiment’s sake. For what possible reason? “‘Cause all she things still in there,” my husband’s ex-employee told me. I explained that this man would receive a commission on a maybe-profitable forthcoming sale and that I was good for it. I walked right to the boardinghouse, then, at the last minute, lost my nerve. The kids were just arriving home from Lower Normal. I explained our expedition. I told how a little girl had once gone to those grand rooms so many years ago to write a school report that got a Satisfaction Minus. Ned said that was not so good. I told him it was the most that anyone could hope for. The key fit and my children picked up on my jitters. They begged permission to wait in the two filthy rockers left on the porch. I would not take no for a answer and opened the door onto the smell of smoke. First it seemed so urgent and so fresh, I wondered if we’d arrived in time to douse a fire. And then I knew the stuffy closed-up rooms had held the smell of Sherman’s torches fifty years. Louisa bravely went over and jerked back velvet drapes and then we seen the armoires full of spiderweb chandeliers. There were punchbowls of Venice glass shaped big as real swans. I spied a set of the plain white Spode like the cup Lady’d clutched for her last addled years. I thought of her poor son in bed three blocks away—a family cursed. The kids felt nervous and got grimy quick. I did, too. I locked it up and found the name of the finest prissiest bachelor antique appraiser in all eastern North Carolina. I let him in and he acted stiff with me at first, but soon reserve give way and I could hear him knee-deep in some Biedermeier desk just whistling.
“Will you look at this,” he asked hisself, not asking, thrilled. On the sales money, we lived. I held back no furniture, no plantation memento.
I kept nothing.
A Body Tends to Shine
It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a matter. Take away the dross from the silver, and there shall come forth a vessel …
—PROVERBS 25:2, 4
ON DAIRY CREAM nowadays, they write: “Best if used before …” Well, faithful visitor, my last safe-fresh year was, oh, around 19 and 51. But here I am—subject to blackouts now and again, eyes most gone, but still cross and talking. Old filbert face. Jerome hates it when I run myself down. He scolds me like sticking up for a child what can’t protect itself. I just laugh.
I’d like to end with happiness. Memory stacks the deck that way, thank God. I’m lately recalling a summer before Cap’s stroke took the civilian porch off his memory’s total war museum. Before Cap blinded Ned. Some days here in bed, I’m grinning about the good stuff. Fronts of my eyes might’ve whited over like a Frigidaire’s double doors—but what’s locked behind stays crisp and cool, child. And till the end, I’ll fight to keep it safe, preserved. He was often out of town. So my final blue-plate leftover special is the perfect troubled summer of 1910.
My children would gobble any bright thing. Whatever shined, our babies ate it. They took light to be a type of snack. I warned them, “All that glitters is not food.” But gulp, then here they’d come running to me, crying. One June day in nineteen-aught-ten here’s Lou, holding the hand of our then third-to-youngest. “Tell her,” Louisa orders baby sister. “Tell Momma what you ate now, pig breath.”
I bow from the waist, I quiz Baby: Has she swallowed something? (A nod.) Please describe the missing item.
“It … siney,” Baby explains. “Siney” was her favorite word that summer.
Lou, bored, bossy by nature, rolls her eyes. “We think it means ‘shiny.’”
I give Louisa the glare. “Listen, you, we’re lucky our Baby here can talk. Just pipe down, Miss Mouth.”
“Darling?” now I’m on my knees before Baby. “Look at me. Look at Momma. Lead Momma to where Baby found whatever Baby put down Baby’s throat.”
Then it happens: my child, my five-year-old, our all-time prettiest girl, points to my third finger, to a callus, the brown married-life groove that shows what’s missing. I glance at the drainboard where I left it.
“You ate Momma’s diamond ring.”
Baby nods a whole lot, ninety fat curls jostle. She gets real big-eyed, she gulps as a test then points to one side of a neck banded with chubby folds. Next the fingertip slides lower, lower, clear down to her breastbone’s top. “It … tickle … Baby.” Hoarse, she keeps us posted.
“Does it hurt you, pumpkin?” I shake her by the shoulders. “Tell Momma how it feels, tell me.”
Baby smacks her lips, tasting. Baby looks off to one side, concentrating. Finally Baby reports, “It feel … siney.”
Seems like Baby swallowed my finger and the finger is crooking itself inside her, signaling, hoping to be noticed and called back. Finally, Baby sobs. I’d been expecting that. Her yellow curls, her jumper with its animal-cracker smocking, her pearly nose, the pinkness otherwise—poor beautiful Baby.
“Are you still married?” Louisa, ten then, is tugging at my apron. Lou can drive you absolutely crazy. Now she bolts off, a hefty interested child, to tell brothers and sisters: Baby has swallowed their parents’ being married. I half believe her. I’m that tired. I feel illegal and alone. Captain’s off traveling with his business. Like lots of young mothers left at home with kids—I speak to my children like they’re the grownups. I talk to adults like they’re my kids.—Too, I’m swallowing mouthfuls of iron pills for anemia. Eight children, no outside help.
Luckily, my particular eight interest me. Few dull moments hereabouts. I now promise my weepy one that everything’ll be fine. She’ll see. “Whatever goes in has got to come out. Understand, Baby?” The poor child pries open her mouth, stuffs many dimpled fingers down her throat. Quick, I stop her. “No, the other end, darling. We’ll wait. It takes a while. Let’s play like Baby is a river and, say, we dropped something into one part, then we can fish it out when it floats upstream (or is it downstream?)—anyhow, you see?—not to worry. We’ll check on everything you … on all your little … you can use a whole separate potty and you’ll bring it to Momma every time, okay? Now, ain’t this going to be fun? The pot will be your own special one, and nobody else can have the use of it. You catching the drift here, peachness?”
“Yeth,” says Baby in baby talk. “I a river.”
“Correct.” Still on my knees, I waddle toward the cabinets underneath our kitchen sink. My burnt and bent pans always end up here last thing before they hit the garbage. Here’s a old white enamel saucepan, red-rimmed, chipped with deep black flecks like worrisome moles. It was amongst my wedding gifts, some centuries before. Used to be my favorite all-time pan, especially for boiling my morning water in. I know I’m sacrificing it forever.
I hope to get Baby excited about this, like a project, see? When she acts calmer, studying her own personal pot, wearing it as a hat, trying to squint into its hollow handle, I question her. In my lightest not-to-worry voice, “Tell Momma why you swallowed Momma’s engagement ring, honey dimple. What …?” (I almost say “attracted you to it,” but that sounds p
retty dumb, so I wait.) “Just … why?” I grin. She must not feel judged.
Baby acts like some famous opera singer answering reporters on the deck of a ocean liner. “‘Cause … it … siney.”
“Siney, yes,” I say. “Shiny.”
Outside, my older children sing how Baby’s done gulped the bride and groom, how this couple’s kids will all stay orphans till the bridal team squirms free again. Then certain brats chant:
We know where they’ll come out.
We know where they’ll come out.
I yowl for kids to shush this very instant. Cherishing her new toy, holding it by the red handle before her face like a personal hand mirror, Baby hears their teasing. She dreads the neighbors’ knowing. Baby stands here dripping tears. Her face, heart-shaped, curdles.
“Say ‘shiny,’” I coo to get her mind off what lays ahead. “Say it.”
“Shiny,” she tries. “That mean ‘siney.’”
“Yeah,” I smile at her. “Go sit on the pot.”