I read it over carefully. My mother's name, Martha Rose Abbott. My father's name, Wilson Eugene Abbott. My name, Cecilia Helen Abbott.
"Helen's a stupid name," I said. I was furious about losing that good dead mother I had imagined. It was as if she had been murdered.
"Helen is my mother's name," she said, folding the paper back up and slipping it into her apron pocket.
I hung the skirt in my closet and pulled my jeans back on. Then I headed over to Saint Elizabeth's. We had worn a path between our house and the hotel. Like goats, my father and I followed the same trail back and forth a dozen times a day. Sometimes the sight of the field rubbed bare in a line would make me angry. I'd walk in the grass two feet beside it for no good reason.
I went in the kitchen door to avoid seeing any of the girls. I wasn't in the mood. Sister Evangeline was alone, sitting in her big armchair near the stove. Soft yellow tufts of stuffing came out of the arms where she'd worn the fabric through. It was getting to be the time of year when it would be too warm for her there. Then my father would move her chair closer to the open window and then finally next to the door of the big walk-in refrigerator when it got really hot in July and August. "I'm like a little houseplant," Sister Evangeline would say whenever my father picked up her chair with her still in it and moved it to the next logical spot. "I just need to be kept in the sun."
Not too far from her comfortable chair was a wheelchair folded up and resting against the wall. That was a recent addition. Sister could walk, but not for very long. She wouldn't sit in her wheelchair during the day, though. She thought it made her look like an invalid. My mother helped her back and forth between the two. If Sister Evangeline was asleep in her chair, my mother would just pick her up in her arms. My mother had started buying staples in large bags years ago; fifty pounds of flour, fifty pounds of rice. She bought entire flats of canned tomatoes from a wholesaler in Louisville. She saved the place money and worked up the shape of a bodybuilder to boot. My mother was two inches shy of six feet tall, and the sight of her walking down the hall with Sister Evangeline asleep in her arms always made me want to cry.
"Hey there, lambchop," Sister Evangeline said to me, wide awake and happy for company. I leaned over and gave her a kiss, and she slapped my cheek hard enough to make me think she'd live forever.
"How are you feeling?" I poked a long strand of white hair back up under her coife.
"Good," she said. "Old. Nothing new there. God made this body, and He's going to get His money's worth out of it." She laughed a little at her own joke. "What about you?"
I shrugged, unfolded the wheelchair, and sat down next to her. "Fine, I guess. I'm in a mood."
"Sweet Lorraine," Sister said.
I'd grown up with Sister Evangeline. My mother said she was the first person at Saint Elizabeth's to hold me. So let's just say I was used to this kind of thing. "Lorraine," I said.
"Listen, pet, just you have some sympathy. This isn't any sign from God, this is just Lorraine coming in and having a lot of other things on her mind." She stopped and tapped the side of her head for effect. "Things besides you. Imagine that! She'd be thinking of things other than you." She took my hand and patted it hard, but none of this was improving my mood. "Don't be sour. This is your trial. I've known it from the day you were born. Folks forget that a place that's easy to live in can be hard to grow up in. They're not the same thing. There was always going to come a time when you'd be mistaken for one of them. It will happen again. You've got to remember, they're good girls, same as you. Only difference is the babies. You're just going to have to steady yourself."
What Sister Evangeline had to say didn't cheer me up so much as just being around her did. She told everyone their problems were silly. She sweetly dismissed everything that was laid out before her. I guess when you get to be that old you have a better sense of what a real problem is. "Give me a saint," I said.
"What is the date today?"
"May fifteenth."
Sister Evangeline closed her eyes for a minute and folded her hands in her lap. This was her favorite game. When I got upset when I was little or did something well, she would give me a saint as a reward. Now she waited for me to ask her so she could show the things she still remembered.
"May fifteenth is the feast day of Saint Isidore, the farmer. He lived in Spain and watches over your friend Sylvia."
I pulled my legs up into the wheelchair and put my head down on my arm.
"He was very poor. Poor all his life He always worked for the same man and was a faithful servant. He had a wife, too"—she looked at me to make her point—"also a saint. When Saint Isidore guided his plow he talked with God or his guardian angel or to other saints. But I shouldn't say other saints, since he didn't know he was a saint himself at that time. That's the tricky part about being a saint. If you ever think of yourself as one it throws you out of the running. I've known people who thought they were saints, plenty of them, and believe you me, they were anything but." She stopped.
"Saint Isidore," 1 said, guiding her back to her story.
"Every moment of his life he was with God. Once he carried a bushel of corn to the mill to be ground into flour and it was winter. On the way he saw the branches over his head were filled with tiny birds, all starving to death in the cold. So Saint Isidore opened his sack and poured half of it on the ground, even though his friends made fun of him for being so sentimental. When they arrived at the mill, his sack was full again, and when it was ground, his corn turned into twice the meal. That's the way God works. He rewards the ones who give things away."
"They made him a saint for feeding the birds? That doesn't sound especially sainted."
Sister Evangeline waved her hand in the air, dismissing my stupidity. "Of course not. There were plenty of other things, things his spirit did after he was dead. It's just that the part with the birds is the part I really like. That's the part that speaks well of God, that He would notice what was done for birds." I remained unconvinced and Sister Evangeline smiled at me. "It will be the last, great project of my life to make a Catholic out of you," she said. "That's why God's keeping me alive so long."
"I am a Catholic," I said.
"A better Catholic, like Saint Isidore."
"You want me to be a saint?" I asked. I was incredulous. I tried to imagine myself, Saint Cecilia, starving in a garret somewhere, giving my last crust of bread to some pathetic, needy squirrel. Wasn't there enough to worry about already?
She read my thoughts like they were running on a screen over my head. "Why not shoot high?" she said. "1 remember the day you were confirmed. I stood beside you and you said your vows and I was so proud of you, I thought, this girl could be a saint."
"Please."
"It's not impossible," she said.
Just then my mother came into the kitchen, her hands full of radishes. "Take these for me," she said, and held out her hands to me.
I took the radishes, their roots clumped with dirt, and put them in the sink.
"Don't you think Cecilia could be a saint?" Sister Evangeline asked.
My mother dropped her chin to her chest and looked up, the way she did whenever she thought things were simply ridiculous. "Cecilia isn't a saint. She's a person, just like the rest of us."
I would never expect my mother to think I could be a saint.
"Saints are people first," Sister Evangeline said. "They're just very good people. You could be a saint, Rosie. Any of those girls in there, all of them. It's possible. A person just needs guidance, they need faith. And you should get that faith from your parents. You should be telling her these things, Rose, not me." Sister Evangeline turned to me, but spoke a little louder to be sure my mother would hear. "Rose is a good Catholic. She just keeps it all in here." She tapped her chest. "Like it was a private thing." She looked up at my mother. "God is not a private thing, Rosie."
"I'll remember that," my mother said.
But Sister Evangeline missed the sarcasm in her voice and se
ttled happily back into her chair. "Good," she said. "Good."
Sometimes I thought about becoming a nun to irritate my mother and make Sister Evangeline proud of me. Either. Both.
"Rinse those off, will you?" my mother said.
"I'm only staying a minute," I said, turning the water on the radishes. The dirt washed away from their tangled roots, sending muddy streams toward the drain. "I just need to get some food."
My mother nodded, going off into the pantry for one thing or another.
"I'm going to make dinner at home tonight for me and Dad."
"You're not eating with us?" Sister Evangeline said. It was the sound I was hoping to hear in my mother's voice. It was disappointment. It made my mother look out of the pantry, first at Sister, then at me.
"Why aren't you eating here?"
I felt trapped. There was no way to say something that would both hurt one and please the other. "Dad seemed so tired," I said. "I thought it might be better for him to stay at home."
"I saw Son outside not ten minutes ago," my mother said. "He's fine." She looked at me, maybe just to figure out what 1 was up to, but she really stopped and looked at me. Sometimes days and weeks can go by without this happening. At that minute I wanted so much to touch her, just her hand or her sleeve.
"I just want to," I said quietly.
"She's growing up," Sister Evangeline said.
And I wanted to tell her no, I'm not. Everything is exactly the same.
2
THE FIRST MORNING after school let out for summer vacation I slept through breakfast and lunch both. There was never much food in our house because my dad and I never ate there. We had food for television watching and midnight snacks, preferably things that wouldn't go bad too quickly since we were slow making it all the way through a bag of something. When I woke up hungry at one o'clock that afternoon I found a jar of popping corn, no oil, two Pop-Tarts, and a bag of prunes. I started over to Saint Elizabeth's.
My mother was alone in the kitchen, eating a sandwich and staring out the window. My mother refused to read while she was eating. She thought it was bad manners, even if you were alone.
"Where's Sister Evangeline?" I asked.
"Asleep," she said. "She had a bad night last night. There was something wrong with her stomach."
"She's all right though?" I stopped, my hand on the door of the refrigerator.
"Fine," my mother said. "Don't worry so much."
I found some chicken salad in a Tupperware dish and sniffed at it just to annoy her. I knew full well she'd never leave anything to go bad.
"I'm going to teach you to drive," my mother said. She didn't say it to me, but she must have. There was no one else there.
"I'm too young to get a license. You have to be sixteen."
"It takes a long time to learn how to drive. You should work on it this summer, while you're out of school. By the time your birthday comes around you'll have it down."
"I'm sure Dad will teach me," I said carelessly, pressing the chicken salad against a slice of bread with a fork.
But my mother liked to teach me to do things. She showed me how to bone a fish with one pass of the knife, how to truss a turkey, change the oil in a car, do taxes. Instruction seemed to be her only method of communication as far as I was concerned. "No," my mother said. "I thought of that. He wouldn't be able to sit in the front seat if it was moved up close enough for you to drive. Besides, he'd be too nervous. Just because a person knows how to drive doesn't mean he knows how to teach someone else how to do it."
It was one thing that my mother was forever missing my attempts to be close to her, but the fact that she didn't get my digs at her either made me insane. "I'll have to get a learner's permit."
"Don't be silly," my mother said. "This is driving, not brain surgery. You don't need to take a test to learn how to drive."
"We'll have to do it in the Dodge," I said.
"The truck will be fine."
"Dad uses the truck," I said, "and the nuns use the station wagon. We can't have regular lessons in either one of those. Besides, if you want to teach me to drive it seems like it should be your car at risk." The truth was, I just wanted to ride in that car. Dad had built a shed for it next to the house when I was still a baby, and my mother had kept it pretty much locked up ever since. She was always turning it on and sitting in it to keep the engine in good shape, and once when the tires rotted through she bought new ones, but the car never went anywhere.
She sighed and ran her hand through her hair. "All right," she said, picking up her plate and washing it off in the sink. "Finish up your lunch."
"We're starting now?"
"Good a time as any."
Maybe we were both nervous. I knew I was, but with my mother it would have been hard to tell. She wasn't talking. She never talked to me unless she had something specific to say, some piece of wisdom to impart. She never said the weather was nice but warm for May. She didn't ask me how I slept or if I was excited about being out of school. My mother would have thought it was a waste of time, stating the obvious. The truth was, we didn't get along. Not the way my friends in school all stopped getting along with their mothers when they hit fourteen. We'd never gotten along. It wasn't that we fought, exactly. We hadn't even progressed that far. She had figured out long ago that Saint Elizabeth's was full of women who were hungry to mother, and I had figured out that nothing short of setting myself on fire in the front lobby would have gotten her attention. The unspoken pact was that we ignored each other. That much we had down to an art.
She was forty that summer, but she didn't look that old to me. My mother was the kind of person whose age would have been impossible to guess. Year after year she stayed the same, thin and tall and straight. On nice days she would sit in the sun on the kitchen porch of the hotel and shell peas, so she always managed to have a little bit of a tan. Her hair stayed the same too, she cut it herself in a straight line under her jaw. It was nearly brown enough to be black. When she pushed it back behind her ears like it was that afternoon, she looked like she could have been twenty, just coming home from college.
My mother had on a red long-sleeved tee shirt with the sleeves pushed up above her elbows and a blue cotton skirt she'd made herself. Everything about her seemed perfect, the way her collarbone raised up above the rounded neck of her shirt. The way her hands were narrow and her fingers were long and thin. The way she walked with her head up, never looking around from side to side. The way it seemed the fact of her beauty had never occurred to her and so made her more beautiful. None of it, not lip or tooth or ankle or eyelash had come to me. And I wanted it. And I knew she would think I was ridiculous for wanting it. And I knew that if I asked her, and if she could give it to me, she would pull her beauty over head and hand it to me like an old dress. "Take this," she'd tell me. "It never did me any good."
We lived in Habit, where no one locked their doors when they went out or when they were home at night, asleep in their beds. My mother raised up the door on the garage. "Keys are in the car," she said. My father had had the car repainted a couple of years ago as a birthday present for her. It looked like something out of a time capsule sitting there. Like it was 1965 in that garage and the car had just rolled off the showroom floor.
We both walked to the passenger side and stood there. "Other side," she said to me.
"What?"
"You're driving."
"I don't know how to drive."
"I know, that's what this is about."
"But I can't drive the car," I said. I started to get nervous, remembering suddenly her rule for instruction in all things: you have to do it yourself.
"Go on," she said, making it clear she didn't have all day to stand there. "Get in."
"Please," I said. "Just let me watch you for a while. Talk to me and let me watch you, then I'll drive."
She shook her head. "You've been watching me drive your whole life. Enough's enough."
"But I wasn't paying attentio
n before." I looked at her. "Mom," I said.
She smiled a little. I never called her that. I never called her anything at all. "Go," she said, and got in the car.
I walked around and got in on the other side. Why hadn't I been paying attention all those years? I was always so happy to be a passenger, looking out the window, counting phone poles. I remember when my mother taught me to swim. She'd take me down to the Panther River and wade me out until the water was over my head, then she'd push me away from her again and again until I found a way to stay afloat. She was so serious about me doing it on my own that I really thought she'd let me drown trying. "Won't you at least back it out for me?"
"What are you going to do, call me for the rest of your life every time you need the car backed out? R," she said, pointing to the letters above the wheel. "Reverse."
She told me how to start it up. How to give it a little gas and let the engine warm itself. She told me how to work the pedals and what all the letters stood for. She was animated as she talked to me over the sound of the car's low idle. "Check your mirrors every time," she said. I made a point to remember that, remember everything. I knew she wouldn't tell me twice.
I looked over my right shoulder the way she said and crept into the field as slow and straight as possible. My hands were sweating and I thought they would slip on the steering wheel.
I looked at the field for the first time as a driver and thought that this wouldn't be a bad place to start. The ground was pretty even and the grass was short. There was really nothing to hit, unless I went into the house or the garage.
"D," my mother said. "Drive."
I shifted the car into drive and we started slowly to go forward. I kept it so slow that the sensation was more like rolling than driving, which was fine with me.
"Steer," my mother said, and tapped the wheel with her finger. "Get the feel of it."
As I turned the wheel the world turned with us, and we started to make our first big circle around the field. "Is this right?" I said. I hit the brakes for no good reason, and we both lurched forward in our seats. I thought I couldn't listen and steer at the same time.