LAST MONTH, HER grieving high school friends made our home their clubhouse. Surrounded by platters of my experimental “fusion” finger-foods, we pulled all-nighters planning our “Celebration of a Caitlin Kind of Life.”
My own ignored gifts—as a poet, woman of taste, one underutilized “people person”—got somehow tapped again.
Young men Cait’d secretly swooned about for years just appeared at our house, alive-and-in-person. Actual leads from Godspell and Sweeney Todd. Two boys in Cait’s class I consider handsomest are both named Matthew. I’d never really seen them offstage, not up-close. One is called BlondMatt and the other BlackMatt.
A simple knock at my front door brought me Matt the blue-eyed brunette. His right hand held purple asters with red maple leaves, a gold trumpet shone in the other. Tears streamed from sky-colored eyes.
His soft face was still a child’s, the voice had dropped to baritone. “I sure see where she got her cheekbones, ‘Caitie’s Mom.’ This thing with her disappearing into Africa has got us all so whacked. But look, one true thing is, I know the Jeremiah Clarke Trumpet Voluntary by heart. Could I maybe play it at Cait’s Memory Mass, please? Need to. For personal clothe-ure.”
BlackMatt meant “closure.” (It was either a speech impediment or some essential mishearing, but did I care?) In English folk songs, there’s often a pretty foolish page boy who beds the king’s lady just before dying at the king’s hand.
Here he stood, jet-dark hair and eyes pure crystal. So I said, “Well, well, it’s BlackMatt come a-callin’ at last. —Our Caitie just adored you.” Such a hug I got!
• • •
MY EX, EDWARD, gave me upper-pills to bring. But I don’t want my senses dulled, just now especially. Should I take beach hikes? Try “journaling”? (Hideous word, like that other clunker: “parenting.”) The family sent me off to this seminar about my favorite poet, Elizabeth Bishop. There will be walking tours near nesting-sites of the many North American seabirds she described. Does this make me sound marginal? The poetry confab was just my family’s excuse. Fact is they want me gone.
On a suburban street as much a cul-de-sac as ours, I am considered a “brainiac,” a “bad left-winger.” Amid neighbors’ trimmed hedges and polished Lexuses, we live more au natural. One thing, I go all-out for Halloween. We blindfold trick-or-treaters, then make youngsters seize peeled grapes: “Cat eyeballs!” You know I’ve had parents phone complaints that our scenarios scare certain younger kids. Nightmares, even. “Boo!” I address such whiners. “Traditional on October thirty-first. ‘Boo!’ Ever hear of it?!” and hang up. No imagination.
But here on the Outer Banks, stuck alone hiking some dune, without benefit of those still depending on me, how can I recover? Without my kids, that’s a challenge too abstract. I am for them. Literally. I need tasks. I’ll willingly help short-order-grill the B&B’s breakfasts. Anything. Busy is good, since it means them. Me with Leisure, that’s the undertow.
• • •
THE DAY CAIT flew to Africa, she naturally cleared my closet floor of final excess footwear.
She’d admitted dreading my motherly emotions at the airport. So she invited four friends to drive her. Out back, I pretended busyness, weeding our tomato patch. Kids’ red convertible honked and, with one wave, my firstborn’s peace sign disappeared down Milford toward The River Road, then off into the International.
I yanked up six more dandelions, resisted sniffling, finally padded barefoot upstairs for a shower. I soon stood looking at my nude and dusty closet floor. I found myself unshod as any African village woman. Somewhere, tribal females are about to shoot up four inches on various teetering wedgie-heights. High-heel divots will soon gouge many a jungle path.
And me? Stranded in the suburbs, shoeless as Eve.
HAVE YOU EVER gone mall shoe-shopping while barefoot?
—Now, that’s loneliness. Six ladylike corns visible to all.
“You’d be about, oh, a size . . .” then they see your bare white feet pressing their cold terrazzo. A look comes across the faces of young clerks that is hilarious. —Always makes me laugh (which only spooks them more, of course).
I found these new Wellington boots—frog-green, rubber marked-to-move—on the back-page of an outdoorsy catalogue from Maine. I needed travel-wear quick. (Fact is, I’m overqualified for this public kind of trouble. I am a deeply shy person—but so unprominent to start with, no one’s ever bothered wondering why.)
• • •
SOME TEEN GIRLS shoplift; our Cait, she sacrificed. (I do too but on her it looked good.) In K2, she daily handed her whole bag lunch—the requested kiwi fruit, her adored cream-cheese-olive sandwiches—to three new Mexican classmates as hungry as their dark eyes. Baby Cait saved nothing for herself, smiling. “No problem-o, mes linda amigos, de nada.” Finally her teacher hid, weeping, in the cloakroom. The woman wrote us, “Never in my thirty-one years as a public educator have I encountered so selfless a . . .”
In my daughter’s school class are two other Caitlins. (You think you’re being unique. And so did the others.) But everybody at grammar school just called the extra Caitlins by their last names. That was hard on “Johnson”; far sadder for little “Winooski.” Twelve years of that. Even teachers agreed there could be only one Caitlin.
My daughter is less part of some gang, more the nubbin of a cult. Her dad helped start it, praising her white-blond pigtails, the husky alto, blinky eyes swerving with a true-blue sweetness. Never any zits. The kid wakes up smiling, was literally born that way—a mewing half-grin you see on certain blind kittens stretching alive, already imagining milk.
Cait arrived able to sense any hurt animal within three hundred yards. She felt one suffering behind Falls High after a violent storm. An oak had fallen. One large crow lay stunned, slammed to the athletic track. Power lines got yanked across a newly-built field house. First Caitie rushes to the cafeteria, opens the top of her skim milk carton, makes a feeder.
As soon as this turkey-sized crow starts sipping, she scampers gymward. “Oh, super, Coach Stimsom. Awesome you’re here! ’Cause power cables just fell across our field house roof. Blue sparks? smelling scorchy? good time for 911? You decide.”
“Wildlife Rescuer Saves New Educational Building, Too.” She was always in the papers and, of course, I felt proud, being myself preeminently Caitie Mulray’s fan, security force, and incidental mother.
Look, when a whatever-nobody gives birth to such a somebody, does that not elevate the mom into briefly being one? And when her somebody disappears, is the mom not—as sort of first runner-up—expected to fill in during that missing queen’s remaining reign?
• • •
STILL, I SWEAR if I left my heather cashmere cardigan hanging on the back of a ladder-back chair, if I didn’t wear a pair of run-down loafers for three weeks, Caitlin summoned the Goodwill van. —Knowing her as I did, seeing how she deficit-spent her spirit all across tiny Falls, NC, I begged Cait not to overgive to immense summertime Africa, please. I had premonitions from the start. She was already essential to our Carolina animals and strangers, prettier than “pretty,” rising school vice pres., our state’s chief regional-quota candidate for Radcliffe, at seventeen.
But, no, Caitlin had to rush off and impress another continent, gone to teach reading to people who cannot even afford books. Don’t people need spare time and bifocals to peruse a novel, even one donated? I hate sounding selfish. But did Cait listen to her literate yet unsentimental mom? Fact of Life: somebodies heed only other somebodies. You’re either a prime number or you’re that perspiring older woman carrying everyone’s heavy picnic hamper, plus the Handi Wipes and, alas, those fifteen extra pounds. —Okay, nineteen.
Just once—if only for novelty’s sake—couldn’t my darling have done as I asked?
No.
• • •
EVEN NOW, THAT is my question, see. That is why my ex-husband and his newest wife—a steady size 6 dress, the PhD thesis upgraded into her book on
Spinoza—that’s why they volunteered to move back East and mind my house, my kids. Because, Edward tells me, even after all our grief and scrutiny, he fears I would rather be told I am right than to hear how I am loved.
(That’s only weird because it’s usually the males’ choice, correct?)
• • •
I BOUGHT THIS zip-up suitcase. Doesn’t quite match the boots, see? Same catalogue, wholly different greens. Where’s quality control? Wouldn’t you think—with those long Maine winters to kill—employees might step outside into the snowy glare and coordinate and standardize their in-house colors?
“Gather yourself oceanside a couple-three weeks, Jean. Join other poetry types talking over your sensitive lesbian poet’s bird sonnets, whatever. It’ll be cheaper than ten days in some Silver Hill clinic-spa-bin. Deep breathing you need. But no more hot-flash actings-out, okay? Poetry’s way easier to explain to kids and neighbors than your . . . than you . . .”
A middle-class form of shunning. And yet, my thoughts are oddly clear. I mean, at least it’s over! The outcome is finally plain. I feel sad, of course, raw. And yet good, too. But should I? is the thing.
CONVENIENT HOW THEY’VE glassed-in this ferry’s observation booth. Am glad we’re up above the engine fumes and all those family vacationers. Look how much gear they’ve lashed to their cars. Ugly Styrofoam. Still, it’s nice that kids get to feed Wonder Bread to so many gulls. Shouldn’t the ferry provide the bread? Can’t help worry if that single chain stretched back there is strong enough. —I’ll keep to myself up here. And no muttering, Jean. Specially if anybody wanders much closer. Not even “single words.” A person can claim that her talking out loud is “an aid to concentration.” But muttering, plus too much public emoting, can get a gal demoted from red-blooded motherhood to seabird poetry.
We still have hours to that island. —Can’t even see the mainland anymore.
II
PARENTS OF OTHER HIGH SCHOOL CO-EDS WOULD CORNER me at malls: complaining they’d overheard daughters discuss the pain of voluntary department-store tongue-piercings. Such girls texted about which boy had the all-time best hair in grades nine OR ten. —And my Cait? busy shipping back-issue Geographics to three flooded schools in Nicaragua.
“But kids down there read English?” I encouraged her realism.
“What they ‘read’ is world imagery, Mom. You so understand this already. You, who left library art books beside our toilets all these years, you kidding? See, I believe a child can catch the habit of questioning from even one image strong enough. Art’s not even needed, least not at first. Just one amazing news-photo can ‘turn’ a kid. The urge to read, to strive, goes on like a switch! —But, silly Mom, you know all this. You taught me it!”
Fellow PTA members pressed, “Jean, tell us how you ‘humanized’ your tween. You could charge for seminars. Your Cait seems welcome in every clique. Goths, jocks, black kids, arty fruitcakes, nobody hates her. Unlike our Millicent, sadly. Oh, and Cait’s been real supportive of Millie’s ceramics. Been buying the ‘artichoke’ teapot on-time, a dollar’s lunch money per week. —Did you even know, Jean?”
I lied, nodding. “How I managed? You diagnose her. —I sure don’t understand. She was born a very particular someone. I just held her little car coat. We still have the roadkill cemetery. By age three, Cait made me keep a tarp and shovel in the back of our wagon. If I passed some squashed raccoon, a Great Dane even, she’d scream, she’d grab the wheel till I stopped. Out of sympathy, she’d try wrecking us. You would not believe what I have touched and made crosses for. (Don’t tell her, but I’ve shifted that menagerie’s improved dirt into our tomato patch.) —Fact is, for me by now, boy-crazy-with-too-much-makeup sounds like fun! Be a relief compared to recycled tin cans with SAVE THE CHILDREN labels Elmer-glued to them, are you kidding?”
Other moms cleared off; they’d heard about my edge. They’d seen my too-elaborate haunted house with me wearing slenderizing black as Hostess Witch. Before the divorce, I always tried keeping my own counsel. Back then, before leaving our house, I’d ask my outfit’s separate tops-and-bottoms, “Do you guys agree to even half-match?” But after Eddie moved three thousand miles due west? I quit editing. I said pretty much . . . whatever to whoever overheard.
In a town like Falls, women are so country-clubby they grocery-shop at seven a.m. wearing best jewelry and full-warpaint. Everybody auditioning. But for what? And if you’re not in one of their three top schlock-reading book clubs, you feel banished. Even certain Atlantic-published writers are discounted. One thing I lack is sponsorship. Candor can leave quite the spatial moat around a person. Intelligence should bridge such gaps. But, they smell your IQ on you. Pisses them off.
IN HER SUNNY corner room that the twins envied—Cait’s bed linen stayed pulled drum-tight as some novitiate nun’s. I’d bring fresh laundry. I’d find my girl’s weekly “Must Do” inventory-philosophy printed in three colors on her whiteboard. (I was hardly snooping, was I?):
Caitie-list, today’s. 1. Do you really need it? More than others? 2. Hungry? But with a pain in any sense different from the rest’s? 3. What expense basic kindness? And, considering it seems easier for you than most, how can you ever run out? Instead of toothpaste (pricey due to ad budgets), baking soda b fine. Once you save some book via memory, why keep it? Brothers Grimm took dictation from old peasant women, did not originate one tale! Popularizers as exploiters? Are novels even valid this late in human history? Can the simply Personal be separated now, teased out, from the general warp-woof of utter Globalism? Fantasy, always a distortion? Argue Escapism’s morality, pro-con. Go with the Emerson again. Couldn’t X-cessive current-event-junkies like Mom be called escapists too? Explore. 4. Do 12 more improving pushups per day, yes. Reread French essays. “Passé composé” still total ball-buster. Break work into smaller units? Needs breakin. 4a. Wallace Stevens.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
5. Whether to dye eyelashes dark . . .? Safety issues. But color would keep you fm. looking like washed-out lab rat. Being this Blond so SUX.
—“A good song can only do well.” —Woody Guthrie.”
• • •
I STOOD HERE, replenishing her clean little midriff-baring T-shirts. Her fresh ones were resting stacked against my own midsector (fully-covered, thanks). Caitie is a list-lover like her engineer dad. They overtrust logic. She sounds, she is, soooo young. Are my girl’s jottings admirable or crazed? —Why waste time on such distinctions?—her scratch-pad doodles are the workshop of a somebody.
Here hung the mind-gym of Radcliffe’s next early-decision southeastern U.S. shoo-in. That’s a fact; and Caitlin Mulray, originally of my own body, was already out there—online, commodified—almost a geographic fact at seventeen.
I AM NOT like Caitlin, travel rattles me. Stage fright gives me near-strokes, even at PTA. I grew up on one street, married the boy from two blocks over. We then settled a literal stone’s throw from our old grammar school.
Yes, I begged Cait not to spend her last high school summer off doing good in Africa. You think she listened? Am I already repeating? Probably. No, she sensed that further volunteering would look excellent on her college applications. So she went. And with her father’s blessing. The rest of what occurred to her, then us, the sadness with its killer one-two shock, even got us (under Human Interest) into USA Today. If short and at the back and stuck below bad future gas prices. “A Model Student, a Parent’s Worst Fear, and Then . . .”
—YOU KNOW HOW it is with Mothers and Daughters: Dogs and Cats.
My own mom’s name was Iris. My father shortened that to Ice. “Meet my wife, Ice.” A trial lawyer, good on his feet, Pop could outargue most men but never the pale sickly girl he wedded-bedded. Ice informed my kindergarten girlfriends that she had led Raleigh’s Cotillion, then played Shaw’s C
leopatra at St. Mary’s. Ice slept in white gloves full of white cold cream to “save my hands.” Saved for what, Ice never said.
My childhood home’s side tables were lidded with glass, glass coasters sparing even first-layer protection. Ice’s being basted in unguents for life, it finally made her the best-moisturized dead lady in local mortuarial memory. Hateful person, if one singularly brilliant. Ambitious for me, of course—years of lessons at every lady-skill taught within forty miles—dressage, decoupage, floral arranging, piano. And I, offered all that prep, what did I aspire to be? Oh, picky picky, I held out for becoming divorced mom of three.
• • •
STILL, BEING A warmer parent than Mother, I’ve tried becoming super (Cait’s word) at least at this. I’ve honestly given it my everything. Whatever might save or even interest my girl. Whatever that costs.
—All morning on this chugging boat, I’ve recalled funny talks with Caitlin in my head; and in there, at least, we still share the odd giggle. I’m yet startled by her stray bilingual puns. One in three truly dazzles. Odd, I’m so unused to being on my own without the kids. I am not quite sure how I come across here. They usually interpret for me, protecting their harried, driven mom.
I did not rate a career as concert pianist, though few girl-children ever practiced harder longer. But, now at their school or ballparks you’ll find me awaiting my darlings in certain choicer parking slots right up front. Yes, terror of crowds ruined my girlhood ballet recitals but now I’m fearless at beating others into the car-queue by 2:10 p.m. I’m brilliant at finding a really “good spot” one hour early so I can retrieve mine or stay late if need be—whatever my incipient geniuses need—extra-tech-rehearsal, added free-throw clinic. Once there, I am the silhouette, mine is the head stooped over her steering wheel absorbing Public Radio civics, old French tapes, replaying Grand Opera for Dummies. I married Ed while a rising sophomore at Sweet Briar. But even now, tucked over my car’s sun visor, you’ll find note-cards enabling self-improvement, even at long red lights: