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LIKE many young mothers, I am overworked, underpaid, and in serious need of a makeup intervention. Every time I look in the cracked mirror above my bathroom sink—which I try to do about as often as I make pie dough from scratch—I hear my mother’s voice: Oh, April, you could be so pretty if you’d just take a little time with yourself.
It’s sad that this is the only time I hear my mom’s voice, and unfair as well. Right up to the end, even as she lay in a narrow hospital bed that smelled of starch and hopelessness, she loved me. I remember how tightly she held my hand, her knuckles bony and blue-veined and sadly translucent for a forty-two-year-old woman. She’d looked at my swollen, pregnant stomach and started to cry. “I just wanted to hold your baby’s hand,” she’d whispered brokenly. “Is that so much to wish for?”
There was nothing I could do but pick up a scrap of white tissue and dry her cheeks. We both knew she would die in a sterile white room tucked into the southeast corner of a concrete high-rise that was miles away from our hometown. That she would never hold my baby in her arms.
I was seventeen. Young and naïve. I didn’t know how much I would come to miss her. Like the horrible night when my milk first came in… or during midnight feedings… birthday parties… tooth fairy visits. I didn’t know then that every happy milestone in my life would carry with it a shadowy lining of loss. But she knew.
Probably it’s just as well that I remember her scolding me. Although it’s been years since her death, the other memories are still tender to the touch.
Besides, I am pretty, in an I-got-pregnant-too-early-and-never-fulfilled-my-potential sort of way.
It was because of the town I grew up in, really. That’s the realization I’ve come to. If I had grown up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, or New York City, the only daughter of two Nobel Prize–winning scientists, I am certain my life would now be different. I would look beautiful and polished and self-possessed at twenty-seven, instead of more than a little tired and old before my time. These are the things my mother wanted for me. The road I turned away from.
I grew up in Mocipsee, Washington. It was—is—a town not unlike a million others in America. Population 4,320. Mostly dairy farmers. Every spring the river floods the valley and the nightly news flashes pathetic, heart-wrenching pictures of toothless men saving stranded animals. Packing sandbags is a normal after-school activity during the soggy months of the year.
High school football is king in Mocipsee. In 1986 we almost won the state championship, and though we lost, the town went crazy, closing down the shops and streets to party in celebration of how close we’d come.
That was the night I first met Ryan. I knew who he was, of course. In a town that idolizes football, the team quarterback is God. But guys like Ryan didn’t talk to girls like me.
We were out in the Kupacheks’ cow pasture—the standard party place in town. A hundred drunken teenagers crowded around a handful of silver kegs. Someone had brought a battery-operated radio. Tinny, scratchy songs hacked through the night, one after another.
I couldn’t believe it when Ryan came up to me. “Hi,” he said. “You’re April Palmer, right?”
I knew even before I opened my mouth that I was going to say something incredibly stupid. What I said—precisely—was, “Uh-huh.”
That was all I could come up with. I winced, waiting for him to laugh at me and walk away, but he just stood there, one hip cocked out, his hand curled around an empty plastic glass, his blue eyes fixed on my face. I offered to get him a refill—anything that would prolong the moment.
“I don’t drink,” he answered. “If I’m going to make the pros, I have to stay in top shape.”
I remember staring at him in shock. A goal. A goal for the future. No one in Mocipsee thought about life after high school. No one went to college. A job at the makeup counter at Nordstrom’s was the best we could imagine. Most of the men around town wore their letterman’s jackets well into their fifth decade, and in the taverns there was always a discussion going on about some football game that had taken place fifteen years before.
Naturally, I fell in love with Ryan right then. That, in and of itself, was hardly noteworthy. The amazing thing was that he fell in love with me back. From that second on, we were as tight as shoelaces. It was only a matter of time (it could be tallied in nanoseconds) before we were having sex in the backseat of his old Ford Fairlane.
I was seventeen when I got pregnant. The first semester of my senior year. It wasn’t all that unusual, a girl my age getting pregnant. None of my girlfriends thought much about it. We laughed and giggled and designed imaginary nurseries, drawings and all. In home ec, we looked up layette patterns and asked what babies ate. We pictured a tiny, pink-faced girl with my black hair and Ryan’s blue eyes.
Now, of course, I see the sadness in all of it, the tarnished truth that we were girls who’d grown up in the rain shadow of the women’s movement and still thought Mrs. Cleaver was the ideal woman. We asked so little of ourselves—and most of us got exactly what we asked for. Funny how that works.
The boys weren’t any better. The football team rallied around Ryan, slapping the “stud” on the back. As if knocking up a teenaged girl was tantamount to throwing a touchdown pass.
The first time I really thought about what it meant to be pregnant was when I told my mother. I remember so clearly how I felt that night, all filled with pride and fear. When I squeezed Ryan’s hand, I could feel his slick nervousness, too.
“Mrs. Palmer?” Ryan said softly, after the dinner dishes were cleared. He stood alongside the fireplace, his hands jammed in his jeans pockets. He shifted from foot to foot, rocking on the linoleum floor like a tiny wooden boat in a rough sea.
My mom came out of the kitchen and looked at us. I wonder now, all these years later, if she missed my father in that moment, if she’d wanted a hand to reach for, but it had been years since my dad had visited any of us.
I went to stand beside Ryan. “We have something to tell you.” I didn’t realize that my hand had moved to my stomach, that I was gently caressing the worn flannel of my shirt.
But Mom noticed. It hurt me, those silent silver tears streaking down her cheeks. “Oh, April…” She sighed, staring down at her work-stained hands. “I wanted so much for you.”
They were words I’d heard many times. My mother was always talking about what she wanted for me. She always told me I could be anything—an astronaut, a cardiac surgeon, a ballet dancer.
I always wondered where my mother collected her big dreams. She had grown up in Mocipsee, the third daughter of five children. She’d gotten pregnant at sixteen, dropped out of school, and gotten married. By twenty, she was a divorced woman raising two small children on a cleaning woman’s wages. We used to drive by Grandpa Joe’s sometimes when I was a kid, and Mom would always point to the tiny white clapboard house and say, “That’s why you go to college, April, so you don’t end up renting a place like that for thirty years and then die without a penny to show for it.”
Now that I’m a parent, I understand. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I wake up in a cold sweat. In the quiet moments before I reach Ryan’s hand beneath the covers, I wonder if I’ve planted dreams in my children’s hearts and souls. I wonder if they believe they can be anything.
“I’ll provide for her, Mrs. Palmer,” Ryan had said with a thick catch in his voice, and I knew that my mother’s tears were scaring him, too.
My mother looked away for a long, long time; then at last, when my anxiety was a living, breathing presence that skittered up and down my skin, she stopped crying. “Well,” she said, valiantly attempting to smile, “I guess we’ve got plenty to do. Let’s get started.”
We di
dn’t know then that the wedding she was already planning would never come to pass, that I wouldn’t have eight girlfriends beside me in pink taffeta dresses and a church full of flowers. We didn’t know then that my mother had less than two months to live.
After the diagnosis, the wedding didn’t matter. Ryan and I got married in the small Episcopal church on Front Street, a hurried affair with only immediate family in attendance. Already my mother was getting weaker. Already my brother and I were donning the somber black look of orphaned children.
We learned quickly that life was different than we’d thought. The best quarterback in Mocipsee history was a long way from good enough for the big leagues. There was no professional sports contract—had we ever really been that naïve?—but there was an offer of college tuition from a small, nearby community college. Ryan got a degree in business and is now the district appliance manager for Wal-Mart. We have built a good life, Ryan and I. Not perhaps what we expected, but what can grow in the shallow ground of so many disappointments?
I see it in his eyes sometimes, the regret over lost boyhood dreams. He shows it quietly, in flashes of reflection on a Sunday afternoon, with the Seahawks playing on television. But I see. I know. And I ache for him.
Oh, he loves me and I love him, but still, on rare occasions, we allow ourselves to peek into the dark rooms of what might have been. We try to look away, but it can’t be done quickly enough. Ryan sees himself in Joe Montana, and he wonders secretly if he should have tried harder.
And me… well, when I peer into those unlit rooms, I see the shadow of a woman who never existed. The woman my mother wanted me to be. As I approach my third decade of life, I feel vaguely unformed, a work in progress.
I had three babies in five years. The first and second were accidents, and after that, I figured What the hell? My boobs already looked like air-to-ground missiles, and I’d forgotten what it felt like not to be nursing. We moved into a nice manufactured home on a wooded lot near the school, and in a fit of immaturity gave all the children “B” names. Bonnie, Bill, and Brad.
I stopped at three—afraid that the next would be Beethoven.
Looking back, of course, I wish I had thought it through better. Our last name is Bannerman, after all. But we were young….
Our oldest, Bonnie, is ten, and already she is beginning to frighten me. Any day she’s going to ask me about periods and dating and things that I want to remain irrelevant for another ten years. Billy is eight, a little athlete beginning to form the same dreams that fueled his daddy, and Brad, my baby, started kindergarten just three weeks ago.
Time goes too quickly.
This is the advice my mother should have given me from her hospital bed. Instead of vague, unknowable quips like “Be careful what you wish for,” she should have told me that time slides away on a hillside of loose shale and takes everything in its path—dreams, opportunities, hopes. And youth. It takes that fastest of all.
I do not feel young anymore. Sometimes when I pass the picture of my mother that hangs on the playroom wall, I stop. I stare at her face, wondering what she would look like now, all these years later. Would she still be coloring her hair to the sandy shade of her youth or would she have yielded to gray at last? Would she still wear those funny pink tennis shoes with the hearts and flowers on the white laces?
Her blue eyes stare back at me, holding the memories of my life. I remember when she used to wear her layered hair in a thin ponytail, tied up with a strand of fuzzy purple yarn; I remember the purple ceramic heart necklace she always wore, the one I made for her in the fourth grade. A big, lopsided heart with a thumbprint in the center. She wore it for years and years, and then lost it gardening one summer afternoon. She missed that necklace for the longest time. At the time, I thought it was silly, missing an ugly necklace, but now I understand. Time goes too quickly.
“Your thumb was so tiny,” she once said, reaching out of habit for the absent bit of ceramic. “How will I remember now how little you used to be?”
“Hey, Mom,” I say softly, touching the cool glass of the picture. I no longer wait to hear her ghostly voice—those innocent hoping days are gone. Instead, I turn away from the picture and get on with my day. I load the dishwasher and pick up a pile of toys; I pull wet clothes from the washer and cram them into the dryer, thumping the ON button. In less than an hour, I am expected at the bus stop to meet Brad, and there are a million things to do between now and then.
THE bus is late.
I glance at my watch again. It has stopped—nothing unusual about that, not for the $13.95 drugstore special with the plastic band—but the casual reminder that money is tight irritates me. A quick fingernail thump on the glass gets the tiny hands moving again. Not that it matters particularly. My internal “mommy clock” is more accurate than any man-made bit of wire and metal. The bus is late.
Beside me, our white German shepherd puppy, Rex, moans despairingly, a sound like the slow leak of air from a punctured tire; then he curls around my feet and closes his eyes to wait for the little boy who loves him. For the past three weeks this has been our routine, mine and this puppy who requires more supervision than a hyper-active toddler (at least children wear diapers) and who has insinuated himself into the consciousness of our family. Already we are beginning to wonder how we survived suburbia dogless. At least, Ryan and the kids are wondering. Me, I remember well, thank you very much. I remember when I didn’t have to keep an FBI security-level count of every shoe in the house; I remember when no one and nothing peed on the carpet. But then Rex bounds across the yard at me, tripping over his own too big paws, his pink tongue dangling from his mouth, and when he starts to lick my face and curls around my feet like a pair of familiar slippers, I am as lost as the rest of my family.
Every day at precisely 12:15 we leave the house together and head for the bus stop on the corner of Peabody and Cross Streets. The puppy drags me from tree to tree, so hard that already I wonder how it will be when he weighs one hundred pounds. Of course, by then I may weigh two hundred pounds, and I may drag him from ice cream shop to beauty parlor.
In the distance I hear the bus, rattling and wheezing over the pockmarked pavement of the street. Rex jumps to his feet and starts wagging his tail, winding the nylon leash around my legs.
“Rex, stop it,” I say with the tired resignation of a woman who has said this same thing to this dog before. Without waiting for Rex to stop, I gingerly extract myself from the makeshift cocoon and bend down to pet him. “Sit.” I try to sound like Ms. Woodhouse, authoritative and certain. I come off more as Pee-Wee Herman, and Rex ignores me.
The bus pulls up to the curb. I hear the shudder of the brakes and the whoosh-clank of the doors opening. Immediately, five- and six-year-olds stream down the steps and onto the sidewalk in a laughing, jostling, centipede of blue jeans and T-shirts.
As usual, Brad isn’t with them. He is always the last off the bus, my little talker.
Smiling, I head for the open door. “Hey, Claudine,” I say, peeking my head inside, “where’s—”
Claudine looks concerned. Her gloved fingers coil nervously around the big black steering wheel. “Brad wasn’t on the bus today. Was he supposed to be?”
“What? What?” The leash falls from my fingers and lands with a soft thump across my feet.
“Don’t panic, April,” Claudine says, although I can see that she is having to work to keep her voice even. I know that she is thinking of Calvin and Suki, her own kids. “He’s probably in the school office right now, trying to call you. That’s what happens most of the time.”
Most of the time.
I push those words away and focus on the others, trying to call you. They are a lifeline. While I’ve been standing here, waiting, doing nothing, my boy has been trying to call to say he missed the bus.
I mean to mumble a thanks, maybe manufacture a smile, but it doesn’t happen. Instead, I turn and run. In some distant part of my brain I can hear Rex loping beside me, his leash s
napping and clanging on the cement; at any other time I would worry that the puppy might trip over the strap and hurt his throat. Right now I can’t even think straight. All I know is that my precious six-year-old is out there somewhere, my baby who doesn’t understand yet about crossing the street and isn’t afraid of strangers.
I hit the house at full stride, crashing through the screen door. There is no message light blinking on the answering machine.
“Stay!” I bark at Rex, knowing this word has no meaning for him. I take a precious second to unsnap his leash and snag my purse, and I am gone again.
It takes several tries to get the car key in the ignition. “I’m coming, Bradley,” I whisper over and over again as the engine sparks to life and I jam the gearshift into reverse.
It is thirteen blocks from our house to the elementary school. I make it in four minutes—four minutes that feel like a lifetime. Fish-tailing into the parking lot, I wrench the old car into park and get out. In two strides, I am running.
He is all right. He’s in the principal’s office—just like the time Bonnie missed the bus in first grade.
I refuse to remember that they called that time, long before I left for the bus stop.
Then I see it.
“Oh, my God…”
Suddenly I am not running anymore. I can’t. I feel as if I am walking under water. The air resists me, draws the oxygen away until I can’t draw a breath.
Slowly, so slowly, I move toward the small blue container that lies fallen on the grassy hillside in front of Mr. Robbin’s third-grade classroom.
A Power Rangers lunchbox.
The fear I have been fighting explodes inside me. I sink to my knees in the grass; my fingers are trembling so badly that it is difficult to pick up the box. I fumble with the plastic latch for a second—lots of kids have Power Rangers lunchboxes, this isn’t Brad’s—then the latch works and the front gapes open. Out tumbles half a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich on wheat bread and an empty vanilla pudding container. Through the plastic baggie I can see that the sandwich is soaked with honey—just the way he likes it. A metal spoon clangs against the side. He has remembered this time to bring it home.