"It's personal," she said, her voice cooling off like the night.
I wasn't afraid. The day had been too much. I had been so afraid since the moment I saw my father's blood that this seemed like nothing suddenly. It was like finding out that dog you had walked three blocks out of your way to avoid every day of your life had no teeth, and in one second you go from being scared of something to maybe even feeling kind of sorry for it. Maybe. "It is personal," I said. "It's personal to me, my life. You're my mother, the man on the couch is your husband, and yet all we seem to be to you are two more mouths to feed. I just want to understand. It's not even like you hate us. I mean, I think I could deal with that. I could get over it. But you don't hate us, you don't even know we're there. Most of the time I feel like I'm either irritating you or boring you to death and I really want to know why."
My mother held her back so straight all the time, even when there was nothing to lean against. "I said I was sorry about the car. I made a mistake. If I'd known your father was so badly hurt I never would have said what I did."
I slapped my hands down hard on the porch and the sound made both of us jump. "You just won't do this, will you? You won't tell me. I'd really gotten to the point that I thought the problem was that I was afraid to ask, but that isn't it at all. I'm so far beneath you, you don't even think I deserve an answer."
She was quiet for a while. "No," she said. "It's not like that."
"Then what is it like? What? Tell me why I'm wrong. Tell me what it is you want." I felt like I was being pulled off the steps, like every force in nature was trying to get me to say, to hell with you, and stalk off into the night. But I fought it. I didn't want to make it that easy on her.
"I guess I always thought that just being here was enough. It's been so hard for me to stay sometimes." She kept her eyes fixed across the field, on her house, the place she wanted to be. "I kept my promises and did what I said I was going to do. Sometimes I fight," she said, and put her fingers on her chest, "just with myself. The part that wants to go and the part that promised to stay. When I moved back to the old house it was because I thought I was going to leave altogether." She waited. Every word seemed to be a burden for her, like she was lifting them up one by one and handing them to me. "Nothing had happened, really, nothing had changed. It was just that I wanted to go again. All these years I thought I'd done a good job because I'd found a way to stay, but I guess if you didn't know those things to begin with, it wouldn't have looked like I was doing anything especially heroic. It probably doesn't look that way even if you do know those things."
"It's that awful for you? We're so bad you have to fight just to stay on the property?"
My mother smiled a little, like I had made a joke. "It isn't you at all. It's just me." She reached out a finger and ran it down along my arm. It felt so strange. "I don't know why things didn't work out better with you," she said. "There were always so many people around who wanted you. So many mothers. I just guess I didn't have it in me. I'd done such a bad job being a daughter. I never could get over that. Maybe I'd been wanting my own mother back for so long it never really occurred to me that I was supposed to be one, a mother. But I shouldn't have given you away, Cecilia. I'm sorry about that."
"You didn't give me away," I said. But she had. That was exactly what she'd done.
"I'm not like you," she said quietly. "I don't think about things the way you do. You give me a lot of credit I don't deserve." She wrapped her arms around her waist, as tight as I had ever wanted to be held. "You think I'm holding things in, fighting them back. The truth is, I don't ever think about the past. It took a long time to learn not to, and now I just don't. I don't ever think about it. I'd do just about anything in the world to avoid thinking about it. The past should stay behind you, where it belongs."
I looked at her, her beautiful face. I felt tired and sad and it was as strong as the anger I had felt before. I had never thought my mother needed my help, and now that I could finally see that maybe she did, I had no idea what to do for her.
"Come on," she said. "Come inside and help me make dinner."
I wanted to say something nice, but I didn't know what. "I'm not mad anymore," I told her.
She smiled at me. She looked relieved, even though I knew she had forgotten I had ever been mad. "Good," she said. "I'm glad."
My mother and I got up and carried the sacks of groceries into the house, quietly past my father. I picked up the pieces of the sugar bowl and swept the floor, and my mother found a new tablecloth in the linen closet. We didn't talk much while we were making dinner. I should have asked her other things, about her mother and what had happened, but it was enough for one night.
When dinner was ready I went into the living room and woke my father up and he said he felt better. The three of us sat at the table together and talked about little things, girls who were about to have their babies and my pen pal, Sylvia, in Spain. We talked about the garden my mother wanted to put out this year, and my father said he knew a place that would be perfect and would till up the soil for her. It was the first time in my life the three of us had had dinner together. Just the three of us, in a house that was ours, and I kept thinking it was the first time things had felt normal. There was my father with his head sewn up and my mother just having told me her life was a joke and I finally felt like things were a little bit normal.
4
LORRAINE made herself right at home. She showed up in the afternoons, flopped herself down on the couch, and put up her feet. "I think Robert De Niro is cute," she said. "I like older men."
"We're talking about De Niro now?" I brought a bag of potato chips in from the kitchen. Lorraine needed salt. She practically took it straight from the shaker. Lorraine was salt by this point. The doctor was always checking her to see if she was all right, but she was fine, just hungry. "What happened to the other one? What's his name? The one yesterday."
"Too light, I decided. Men should be dark. Italians. Al Pacino." She took the bag and tore it all the way down the middle. It was clear she wasn't planning on rolling it back up later on.
I owed Lorraine, no doubt about it. But in all fairness to her I don't think that's what she was thinking of when she decided to make herself a permanent fixture in my house. The truth was, Lorraine just seemed to like it better here than at Saint Elizabeth's.
"They're all so serious over there," she said. "I mean, give it a rest. How many hours in the day can you discuss the size of your ankles?"
It wasn't what she'd done for me, helping me with my dad and taking the heat from Mother Corinne. It was just that we'd spent this time together, and now she wanted to be friends. She'd wanted to be friends all along. After the accident she started showing up and asking me to go for walks. Then she just started coming in and getting comfortable. Sometimes she'd come by right after breakfast, or come home with me after dinner, running half the way back to make bed check in time. Lorraine's roommate was a girl named Loelle, who divided her time equally between reading romance novels and sobbing. "Loelle," Lorraine said. "Do you think she made that name up or what?" She ate a potato chip and ran her finger down the inside edges of the bag, fishing out the salt. "Not that I haven't tried talking to her, but she's one of those people that likes to cry alone."
I guess my feelings for Lorraine had softened a little bit. She still got on my nerves, but it was summer and I was pretty bored. Summers at Saint Elizabeth's could be deadly. After years of having people tell me everything about their life, it was nice to have someone I could talk to for a change.
It wasn't just me that Lorraine was interested in, she wanted my whole family. My father, who liked just about everybody anyway, took a special interest in her after our trip to the hospital. The fact that she had taken up residence on our couch and in our refrigerator seemed like the most natural thing in the world to him. He even made a point of buying the foods she liked: chips, pretzels, olives, canned anchovies.
"Jesus, Son," she said when he came hom
e from having his stitches out. "It looks like someone hit you in the head with an axe."
We were watching "Jeopardy," keeping score on the back of an envelope. I looked up and saw him standing in the doorway, a red crease in his forehead which went straight across above both eyebrows.
"You think?" he said, touching it lightly.
"I don't think," I said, and threw a couch pillow at Lorraine. We'd had to buy new ones. I couldn't get the others clean.
"It gives you character," she said. "It makes you mysterious."
I could never get used to the way she talked to my father. It was almost like she was flirting with him. Not that she was, I don't think, but it embarrassed me to death just the same. Dad never seemed to notice.
"They did a good job, I thought," he said. "The doctor said it will fade some. It won't wind up being this bad."
"It isn't so bad," I said, even though it was. "We'll put some vitamin E on it. I read where that's supposed to make the difference."
But Dad just shrugged and headed out to the kitchen to find his tape measure. "Just one of those things," he said.
"You didn't need to make him self-conscious about it," I whispered to Lorraine.
"He's not self-conscious," she said. "You're just crazy." Lorraine was famous for saying whatever came into her head. There was no processing a thought with her. Something would occur to her and a split second later it was out of her mouth.
My father wasn't the only member of the family she was trying to endear herself to. She had signed up to be the helper in the kitchen and liked it so well she wound up putting in twice the hours of any of the other girls. Sister Evangeline had already told her she was going to have a boy. Lorraine joked about calling him Cecil for me. "Cecil Stone," she said, because Stone was her last name.
My mother liked Lorraine as well as she liked anybody else in the world, which is to say fine but not with any particular warmth. Lorraine, on the other hand, was fascinated by my mother.
"I can't imagine having Rose as a mother," she said. "She's very mysterious." Mysterious was one of Lorraine's favorite words. Robert De Niro was mysterious. The hotel was mysterious. My mother was mysterious. "I bet she had a lot of lovers when she was young."
"She's my mother, for Christ's sake. Can't you give it a rest?"
"She wasn't always your mother," she said, trying her best to sound worldly. "She did have a life before you, you know."
Lorraine liked to make it sound like she and my mother were together in that other life, being beautiful and young, sitting in cafés in Paris, drinking espresso and making daring eyes at the waiters. She probably saw the two of them under a red umbrella, exchanging sex tips or something. Lorraine wanted to be close to my mother, but I could have told her she was out of luck.
Nothing had really changed with my mother after we talked the night of my father's accident. I thought it would somehow. I even thought that she might stay over, move home. But after the last dish was in the dish rack, she said good night and headed out across the pasture. My father stood out on the front porch, waving, then just watching her go. He was so happy that night. Having his head split open was well worth it to him if it meant we all sat down together as a family and had dinner. But for me it felt even worse. I was wanting her again. I was wishing she would stay.
We still had driving lessons, and in the car she was more inclined to talk. "I don't know why you want to keep having lessons," she said when I asked for one a few days later. "You drove all the way to Owensboro by yourself. What more can I teach you?"
"It was a fluke," I said. "It doesn't mean I know anything."
So every two or three days she'd agree to go out with me. We drove around in circles: east to Reynolds Station, south to Pleasant Ridge, north to Philpot. She told me about dates she went on in high school, working in a candy factory, the ocean. But mostly what my mother wanted to talk about when she was in the car was the car itself, driving.
"I picked up a hitchhiker once," she said.
"You're kidding me."
"No, I did. And if I ever catch you picking one up so help me God I'll kill you, if he doesn't do it first."
"Where was this?"
"In Texas, I think, maybe west Oklahoma. He was going to some little town in Arkansas. His name was Billy. I always wondered what happened to him. He was such a sweet kid."
"What happened?" I asked, thinking of what Lorraine had said about her. Suddenly I was wondering if it were true, if my mother had had lovers, maybe even hitchhikers.
"What do you mean, what happened? Nothing happened. I drove him to his parents' house, I had dinner, spent the night, and then went on."
"You spent the night?"
"Get your mind out of the gutter," she said mildly, looking out her window. "You've been spending too much time with Lorraine."
At least she noticed who I was spending time with.
My mother reached into the glove compartment and shuffled through a stack of maps the size of a phone book until she found a pair of sunglasses. She wiped them off on her skirt and slid them on. You could tell they were from the sixties, with the big white frames. They'd been in that glove compartment for so long they'd come back into style. In sunglasses, my mother looked like a movie star. She leaned back in the seat and tilted her chin up toward the light. "Driving is the most important thing you can learn," she said. "It's the secret of the universe."
I was a natural behind the wheel, my mother said so. I'd been driving less than a month and already I was passing people, easing into other lanes, getting onto the off ramps at just the right speed. I dreamed of making a cross-country trip, just the two of us. Always staying inside that blue car, where we were completely at ease with one another. Completely alone.
Of course, the driving lessons put Lorraine beside herself. "This is great," she said right off when I told her I was going to keep practicing. "I don't know how to drive."
"And you never will," I said, trying to find my sneakers under my bed.
"But I want to come."
"You can't come," I said. I sat down on the floor and pulled on my shoes without unlacing them. "Listen, this is nothing personal." I didn't try to explain it further than that. I didn't entirely understand it myself.
But if there was one thing Lorraine couldn't bear, it was being left out. She asked again in the kitchen one day, with my mother and Sister Evangeline standing right there so I wouldn't be able to make a scene, but this time it was my mother who said no. "I'm not a driving instructor," she said. "I'm just teaching my daughter how to drive. There's a difference. As soon as Cecilia gets her license I'm sure she'll teach you."
So Lorraine waited for us, looking as sad sack as was humanly possible. She was always doing something ridiculously thoughtful when we came in, like cleaning out the big walk-in refrigerator at Saint Elizabeth's.
"Have fun?" she said, a damp rag in her left hand.
I looked to my mother for a little support, but she had already clicked back into place. Without her sunglasses she was the cook again, oblivious, busy.
"Lorraine's been here all afternoon, working away," Sister Evangeline said. "You girls should be outside, have some fun. It's too nice a day to be stuck in the kitchen."
"You want to do something?" I asked Lorraine, but she kept her head deep in the refrigerator. Her feelings were hurt. She'd been lonely all afternoon. She wanted me to tempt her outside. "Come on," I said. "We'll go lie out. We'll get some iced tea and take it out in the pasture."
"What?" Lorraine said. She poked her head out for a minute. "Did you say something?"
"I said you needed some sun." Why did she have to go through this every time? "It's the middle of summer, you look like a sheet."
"Go to the Panther," my mother said out of the blue. I could never believe she actually heard what was going on around her.
"How are we going to get there?"
"Drive," my mother said. "You drove to Owensboro. I guess it wouldn't kill you to drive to the ri
ver."
At this, Lorraine was in full swing. "I haven't been swimming all summer."
"Just be back before dinner," my mother said. "No sense getting everyone in trouble." Somewhere along the way my mother had decided I knew how to drive and the fact that I didn't have a license didn't seem to figure into her equation at all. She'd never been pulled over by the police, so police didn't figure in either.
Lorraine and I went back to my house and I lent her a swimsuit. She changed in the bathroom and came back with the suit on under her clothes. We found a couple of old towels and a bedspread nobody ever used. We packed some food, mostly things with salt, and a couple bottles of Coke and headed off to the car. By one o'clock I was back out on the road.
Habit sat pretty much in the fork of the Panther River. You could hit it going about ten miles north or ten miles south, though everybody knew that south was better. The river pooled in a couple of places and was deep enough to swim in without touching bottom. The current was slow and there were flat banks. It was the place that you wanted to be from the first day of summer. The place you had to drive to get to.
We unloaded our stuff and spread our towels out on the grass. It was good and hot and I decided I wanted to build up a sweat before I got in the water. I pulled my shorts off and my shirt over my head and stretched out. Lorraine sat down beside me and watched the boys who were swimming in the river.
"Take your clothes off," I said. "You're going to get weird lines that way."
"I'm fine," she said.
One of the boys came out of the water, shining like a new car. He waved to me. Andy LeBlanc from my school, a year ahead of me. I waved back, thinking there was no way he would have known who I was. Then I thought that maybe he was waving just because I was a girl in a swimsuit, sitting on the bank of the river. He probably didn't even know we went to school together. For some reason that made it even better.