What We Keep

  And she did not. She merely said, in a voice that let me know she was smiling, “You know what you once called sunlight?”

  “No.”

  “Sun night.”

  I looked up at her. “Really?”

  She nodded. “It was apt, really. You were a couple months short of two, and I was holding you in front of your window—right over there—before I put you to bed. I was swaying just a little, you used to really like that. There was a magnificent sunset that night. And you took your thumb out of your mouth and pointed out the window and said, ‘Sun night. ’Night, ’night.’”

  I smiled, adoring my baby self.

  “And you know what you used to call orange juice?”

  I shook my head.

  “Undies.”

  I laughed.

  “Yes, you did. And the best—”

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Sharla asked.

  We hadn’t heard her come up, but there she was, standing in the doorway.

  “Sharla,” my mother said, her voice low and soft.

  Sharla stood immobile. I pulled away from my mother, moved down a bit on the bed. There was room for us all. Our mother was home now. She would repair everything in the way she always had: sunburned shoulders, saggy hems, darts to the heart from the careless ways of friends.

  “Who told you you could come in here?” Sharla asked.

  I laughed, involuntarily. That Sharla would suggest our mother needed permission to come into our bedroom!

  And yet, “Well … no one,” my mother said, her voice small and culpable. I hated her acquiescing in this way. Why didn’t she take Sharla to task for her rude behavior?

  “She can come in here,” I said.

  “Not on my side, she can’t.” Sharla breezed over to her bed. She put a glass of milk down on the nightstand, omitting the coaster we were always supposed to use. I waited for my mother to say something. She did not.

  “You need a coaster,” I said, but before the words were fully out of my mouth, Sharla said, “Shut up, baby! You baby!”

  “Now, just a minute,” my mother began, and Sharla whirled ferociously toward her. “You shut up, too! You’re not allowed. You’re not allowed!”

  There was a moment of thick, awful silence, and then Sharla started kicking at the air. “Get out!” she yelled. “Just stay out! You’re gone! So go!”

  I knew she wanted to cry; I could hear the tears in her voice fighting for release, but she would not give in, she would not.

  My mother moved to Sharla’s bedside. Sharla raised a fist, then held it, trembling slightly, in the air between them. My mother wrapped her own hands around it. “I know you’re angry,” she said gently. “I don’t blame you.”

  “I’M NOT ANGRY!”

  Well.

  My mother let go of Sharla’s fist, sat down beside her, then patted the bed on the other side of her. “Come over here, Ginny,” she said. And then, to Sharla, “Is it all right if Ginny sits here?” The question came too late; I was already there.

  “Yeah, she can,” Sharla said. “She is my sister. You are no one.”

  My mother sighed, looked away, then down at her feet. I saw that she was wearing tennis shoes and bobby socks. I thought, in some distant portion of my brain, that it looked cute—both bows tied so evenly. In a more distant part I was thinking, I have so much homework. And in the farthest recess, I held the image of my father, standing straight, smiling pleasantly, saying, “Marion? Marion?”

  “I would like to tell you girls something,” my mother began.

  “Sorry, no time to listen,” Sharla said, and my mother said sharply, “Stop it, now, Sharla. You stop this. I want to tell you something. It’s important.”

  To my surprise, Sharla said nothing.

  Our mother rose, crossed over to my bed, and sat down opposite us. Then she looked at us with such aching love I felt the need to shudder, though I did not.

  “This is what happened,” she said. “I want you both to know everything. Why I went away. I think it will help you. Okay?”

  Sharla said nothing. I nodded, swallowed. I wasn’t sure I needed to hear it. I needed only for her to change clothes and start dinner.

  Our mother massaged one of her hands with the other, then rested them both in her lap. She cleared her throat, sat up straighter. “You know, I used to shop for groceries on Wednesday night,” she said.

  At this odd beginning, I knew Sharla and I both wanted to look at each other. But we stayed focused on her.

  “Well, one of those nights, early last spring, something happened. I was—”

  Sharla belched long and loud with her mouth wide open, then reached for her milk and took a slurpy drink. I wanted to knock the glass out of her hand.

  My mother looked at her, said nothing for a long time. I felt the air around us change, felt it grow heavy and specific. Finally, our mother said, “If you don’t want to hear this, Sharla, I can’t make you. I think it’s important for you to listen. For you and for me. But you don’t have to. If you would like, I will take Ginny downstairs and talk to her there.”

  My stomach felt punched. “I—” I began. I didn’t know what I wanted to say. I wanted only that my loyalty not be tested in either direction.

  But then Sharla spoke. “So talk, then,” she told my mother. “Go ahead.”

  My mother took a deep breath, resettled her shoulders. “All right. I went grocery shopping that night and when I was driving home, I passed that place by the river where you can pull over.”

  “Kids park there,” Sharla said.

  “Yes, they do,” my mother said, and I was shocked that she knew this. “But no one was there that night. And I just wanted to look at the water. I just wanted to be there. I turned off the engine and I sat there for a long time and then I … Well, I took my wedding rings off and threw them out the window.”

  I stopped breathing. My foot, turned for a moment on its side, stayed there.

  “I got out right away and found them,” she said. “But I didn’t put them on. I felt like I couldn’t put them back on.”

  “Why not?” Sharla asked, and it irked me that she seemed to know more about this story than what was being told.

  And so “Why not?” I asked, too.

  She smiled, a sad thing. “I just couldn’t. And then I didn’t know what to do with them. So I put them in my wallet. And I put my wallet back in my purse and put my purse on the floor. I felt like when you put a baby down, when you’re so tired, and you just want to put the baby down, but then when you do, it reaches up for you. And you can’t move. You can’t lift it again, but you can’t walk away, either. You feel … stuck. You feel like crying. You feel like screaming. And you feel bad that you feel that way, you feel so bad!” She laughed, looked at us as though we might have some idea what she was talking about.

  “Anyway, that night, after I put my purse down, I … well, this is really true. I thought I heard the rings talking to me! I thought I heard them whisper. I thought I heard them cry. And so I put them back on.”

  I smiled, uneasily. She used to try to make up bedtime stories to tell us, sometimes, when we were all done with the library books we’d checked out that week. She would make up stories that were not very good, as this one was not.

  But now she was staring at the wall, warming to her own revelations. “I took the rings off because at the grocery store they’d been out of green peppers and I’d started crying. And I knew it wasn’t green peppers I was crying about, it was my marriage.” She looked at us, shrugged.

  “We can’t hear this,” Sharla said, standing suddenly. “What do you think we are, your friends?”

  “Can you be?” she asked.

  I looked at Sharla for the answer, found it in the line of her clenched jaw.

  “You’re our mom,” I said quietly.

  “I’m your mother, but I’m also a person. I’m a person!”

  “I’m calling Dad,” Sharla said, and started to leave the room.


  My mother grabbed her arm. “Don’t,” she said. “Let me finish. Then I’ll leave. I’m not staying.”

  I felt as though one step away from me the earth had opened up wide.

  “What do you mean?” I managed. “You just got back. You were gone so long. You just got back!”

  “Listen to me,” she said. “Both of you. You might not understand everything I’m saying to you now. But you’ve got to hear it. I can’t stay here. I can’t be married to your father. In this time away, I have begun to see so much. And I can’t be your mother in the old way anymore. I want to be better than that!”

  “But you’re a good mother,” I said quickly, and Sharla just as quickly said, “No, she’s not.”

  “Well you’re absolutely right, Sharla,” my mother said. “I wasn’t a good mother. But I intend to be one from now on.”

  Sharla snorted.

  “Just listen to me,” she said. “Let me finish. At the river that night, I got out of the car and I lay down on the ground.”

  I saw her doing it: she would have smoothed her skirt beneath her, kept her knees and ankles pressed together.

  “The trees looked like negatives, I remember that, the leaves weren’t out fully, and it was cold, but I didn’t feel cold. The moon was full and so beautiful and I remember thinking I wanted it in me, to shine out of me, you know? To shine out from between my teeth and out of my ears and … oh, I just wanted everything to finally come!”

  “I’m calling Dad,” Sharla said again, and left the room. And then she stuck her head back in to say, “Don’t stay here with her, Ginny. She’s crazy. Come with me. Come on. I’m calling Dad.”

  I sat still, and Sharla left, clattered down the stairs.

  My mother looked over at me. “Do you understand, honey? I felt full of magic for a moment. I felt that anything could happen. Things could really change! And then that feeling all drained out of me. And I got back in the car and I came home. And I put the groceries away. And your father came into the kitchen to ask if I’d gotten baloney and of course I’d gotten baloney because I always got baloney, I brought home the exact same kind and the exact same amount every week. I wanted to take his face between my hands and say … and say ‘Please, can we just stop living this lifeless life, can we just let each other out of this prison we’ve created! I just wanted to—”

  I snuffled loudly, involuntarily. I had started to cry and the tears flowed unimpeded down my face, onto my sweater.

  “Oh, Ginny,” my mother said softly, and she knelt before me, took my hands into hers. “If I stay here, I’ll die, I really believe that. We’ll be together soon, you and Sharla and I. I’ll come and get you. I’ll be back. Okay?”

  I opened my mouth, took in a jerky gulp of air.

  “Ginny, can you possibly understand? I feel I am finally telling the truth.”

  Something interesting happened then; I watched it from above. Some switch got thrown and I did not care about anything happening before me. Outside, it was growing dark; my father would be coming home soon and we would resume our lives without her. He had learned to make angel cake; we could have it whenever we wanted. He put away clean laundry in our dresser drawers, only rarely making his tender little mistakes.

  I started unloading my school books. “I have to do my homework now,” I said.

  “Ginny,” my mother said. “Listen to me. I’m living with Jasmine, she and I—”

  Jasmine! “I have so much history,” I said. “My teacher, Mr. Stoltz, he’s nuts. He thinks all we have in our lives is history.”

  “I am living in New Mexico,” my mother said. “I have started art classes, my painting is becoming so … I … Ginny, don’t you see that it breaks my heart not to be living with you and Sharla? But I have finally begun to learn a kind of happiness that I thought I would never know! I have to get stronger in all this, I need to—”

  “I want you to go now, please,” I said.

  Sharla came up the stairs, went over to her bed, dumped her books out of her bag. “Get out,” she said, her voice deadly calm. “We don’t need you.”

  I lay down, opened my history book, held it before my face.

  I heard my mother start for the bedroom door. “I’ll write to you then,” she said. “I’ll try to tell you in a letter.”

  “Good-BYYYYYYE,” Sharla said.

  My mother leaned down to embrace me. She was crying, quietly; I hugged her without looking at her. Then she started toward Sharla, who looked up and said, “If you get near me, I’ll call the cops. I swear to God.”

  My mother touched Sharla’s shoe, then left. I heard a car door slam, and I asked, “Did she drive here?”

  “Who?” Sharla said.

  “Mom.”

  “Who?” she asked again.

  “Mom!” I answered, and then I understood. We did homework for twenty minutes in complete silence, until our father got home. Then we went downstairs to meet him.

  “Where is she?” he asked, taking his coat off.

  And we told him. Gone again.

  Only an hour left before we land. I pull my compact out of my purse, check my makeup, apply some lipstick. Then, staring at my face, I think about the fact that I am older than my mother was when I saw her last. I wonder what she looks like now.

  The most recent photographs we have of our mother show her at thirty-five. The last time I looked at those photos was a few Thanksgivings ago, when Sharla and I had brought our families to our father’s house for the holiday. The men were watching football, the children playing in the newly installed rec room in the basement. Dinner was running a bit behind, and Georgia insisted she didn’t want any help, that at times like this she functioned better alone.

  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.

  In 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.