I don’t know what my mother remembered either.
“But it did get me thinking about Marilyn,” my mother continued in her breathy voice, “and so I asked later in the week when I saw that so-and-so person from the—oh, you know, Wizzle, the place—”
“Chatwin’s Cake Shoppe.”
“That place,” my mother said. “Yes, the woman who still works there—she knows everything.”
“Evelyn.”
“Evelyn. So I sat down and had a piece of cake and a cup of coffee and I said to her, ‘You know, I thought I saw Marilyn what’s-her-name the other day,’ and this Evelyn, I always liked her—”
“I loved her,” I said. I did not say I loved her because she was good to my cousin Abel, good to me, that she never said a word when she saw us going through the dumpster. And my mother did not ask why I loved her.
My mother said, “Well, she stopped wiping the counter and she said to me, ‘Poor Marilyn married that Charlie Macauley from Carlisle, I think they still live nearby now, but she married him back when they were in college, and he was a smart fellow. So of course they take the smart ones right away.’ ”
“Who takes them?” I asked.
“Why, our dirty rotten government, of course,” my mother answered.
I said nothing, just looked up at the ceiling. It has been my experience throughout life that the people who have been given the most by our government—education, food, rent subsidies—are the ones who are most apt to find fault with the whole idea of government. I understand this in a way.
“What did they take Marilyn’s smart husband for?” I asked.
“Well, they made him an officer, of course. During those Vietnam years. And I guess he had to do some terrible stuff, and from what Evelyn was telling me, he’s never been the same. So early in their marriage this happened, very sad. Very, very sad,” my mother said.
I waited quite a while, quite a while I waited, lying there with my heart thumping, I can remember even now the thumping, the banging of my heart, and I thought of what I had—to myself—always called the Thing, the most horrifying part of my childhood. I was very frightened lying there, I was frightened that my mother would mention it after all these years, after never mentioning it ever, and I finally said, “But what does he do—as a result of this experience? Is he mean to Marilyn?”
“I don’t know,” my mother said. Her voice seemed suddenly tired. “I don’t know what it is he does. Maybe there’s help these days. At least there’s a name. It’s not like they were the first people to be trauma—whatever the word is—by a war.”
In my memory of this, I was the one to get us away as fast as we could now, as fast as we could, from where my mother may—or may not—have known she was headed.
“I hate to think of anyone being mean to Marilyn,” I said, then I added that the doctor hadn’t yet come in to see me.
“It’s Saturday,” my mother said.
“He’ll come anyway. He always does.”
“He won’t work on a Saturday,” my mother said. “He told you yesterday to have a good weekend. To me that doesn’t sound like he works on a Saturday.”
Then I became afraid. I became afraid that she was right. “Oh, Mommy,” I said, “I’m so tired. I want to get better.”
“You’ll get better,” she said. “I’ve seen it clearly. You’ll get better, and you’ll have some problems in your life. But what matters is, you’ll get better.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am sure.”
“What problems?” I asked this in a way that tried to sound joking, as though what did I care about a few problems?
“Problems.” My mother was quiet for a while. “Like most people have, or some people. Marriage problems. Your kids will be all right.”
“How do you know?”
“How do I know? I don’t know how I know. I’ve never known how I know.”
“I know,” I said.
“You rest, Lucy.”
It was still the beginning of June, and the days were very long. It was not until the lights were just starting to show in the dusk through the window that gave us the magnificent view of the city that I heard the voice at my door. “Girls,” he said.
We had been living in the West Village a few years when I attended my first Gay Pride Parade, and living in the Village made the parade a big deal. This was natural. There had been the history of Stonewall, and then the awful business of AIDS, and many people came to line the streets and be supportive and also to celebrate and mourn those who had died. I held Chrissie’s hand, and William held Becka on his hip. We stood and watched as men walked by in purple high heels and wigs and some in dresses, then there were mothers who marched by, and all the kinds of things you see at such an event in New York.
William turned to me and said, “Lucy, Jesus Christ, come on,” because of what he saw in my face, and I shook my head and turned to go home, and he came with me and said, “Oh, Button. I remember now.”
He was the only person I had told.
—
Perhaps my brother was a freshman in high school. He may have been a year older, he may have been a year younger. But we still lived in the garage, so I would have been about ten. Because my mother took in sewing, she kept various pairs of high heels in her basket in the corner of the garage. That basket might have been like another woman’s closet. In it were also brassieres and girdles and a garter belt. I think that those were for women who needed some alteration done and had not arrived with the right underclothes; even when it was normal for all women to wear these things, my mother did not bother to wear them, unless she had a customer coming over.
Vicky came shrieking toward the schoolyard to find me that day, I don’t even know if it was a school day or why she wasn’t with me, I only remember her shriek and the gathering of people and the laughter. My father was driving our truck along the main street in town and he was screaming at my brother, who was walking down the street in a pair of big high heels I recognized from the basket, and a bra over his T-shirt, and a string of fake pearls, and his face was streaming with tears. My father drove alongside him in our truck screaming that he was a fucking faggot and the world should know. I could not believe what I saw, and I took Vicky’s hand, though I was the youngest, and I walked her all the way home. My mother was there and said that our brother had been found wearing her clothes, and it was disgusting and my father was teaching him a lesson and Vicky should stop her noise, and so I took Vicky away in the fields until it was dark and we became more afraid of the dark than of our home. I still am not sure it’s a true memory, except I do know it, I think. I mean: It is true. Ask anyone who knew us.
That day of the parade in the Village, I think—but I’m not sure—that William and I had a fight. Because I remember him saying, “Button, you just don’t get it, do you?” He meant I did not understand that I could be loved, was lovable. Very often he said that when we had a fight. He was the only man to call me “Button.” But he was not the last to say the other: You just don’t get it, do you?
—
Sarah Payne, the day she told us to go to the page without judgment, reminded us that we never knew, and never would know, what it would be like to understand another person fully. It seems a simple thought, but as I get older I see more and more that she had to tell us that. We think, always we think, What is it about someone that makes us despise that person, that makes us feel superior? I will say that that night—I remember this part more than what I just described—my father lay next to my brother in the dark and held him as though he was a baby, he rocked him on his lap and I could not tell one’s tears and murmurs from the other’s.
“Elvis,” my mother said. It was nighttime; the room was dark except for the lights of the city through the window.
“Elvis Presley?”
“Is there another Elvis you know of?” my mother asked.
“No. You said ‘Elvis.’ ” I waited. I said, “Why did you say ‘Elvis,??
? Mom?”
“He was famous.”
“He was. He was so famous, he died from it.”
“He died from drugs, Lucy.”
“But that would be the loneliness thing, Mom. From being so famous. Think about it: He couldn’t go anywhere.”
For a long time my mother said nothing. I had the feeling she was really thinking about this. She said, “I liked his early stuff. Your father thought he was the Devil himself, the foolish things he wore in the end, but if you just heard his voice, Lucy—”
“Mom. I’ve heard his voice. I didn’t know you knew anything about Elvis. Mom, when did you listen to Elvis?”
Again there was a long silence, and then my mother said, “Eh—he was just a Tupelo boy. A poor boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, who loved his mama. He appeals to cheap people. That’s who likes him, cheapies.” She waited, and then she said, her voice for the first time, really, becoming the voice from my childhood, “Your father was right. He’s just a big old piece of trash.”
Trash.
“He’s a dead piece of trash,” I said.
“Well, sure. Drugs.”
I said, finally, “We were trash. That’s exactly what we were.”
In the voice from my childhood, my mother said, “Lucy Damn-dog Barton. I didn’t fly across the country to have you tell me that we are trash. My ancestors and your father’s ancestors, we were some of the first people in this country, Lucy Barton. I did not fly across the country to have you tell me that we’re trash. They were good decent people. They came ashore at Provincetown, Massachusetts, and they were fishermen and they were settlers. We settled this country, and the good brave ones later moved to the Midwest, and that’s who we are, that’s who you are. And don’t you ever forget it.”
It took me a few moments before I said, “I won’t.” And then I said, “No, I’m sorry, Mom. I am.”
She was silent. I felt I could feel her fury, and I sort of felt, too, that her having said this would keep me in the hospital longer; I mean, I felt it in my body. I wanted to say, Go home. Go home and tell people how we weren’t trash, tell people how your ancestors came here and murdered all the Indians, Mom! Go home and tell them all.
Maybe I didn’t want to tell her that. Maybe that’s just what I think now as I write this.
A poor boy from Tupelo who loved his mama. A poor girl from Amgash who loved her mama too.
I have used the word “trash,” as my mother did that day in the hospital as she spoke of Elvis Presley. I used it with a good friend I made not long after I left the hospital—she is the best woman friend I have made in my life—and she told me, after I met her, after my mother came to see me in the hospital, that she and her mother would fight and they hit each other, and I said to her: “That’s so trashy.”
And she, my friend, said, “Well, we were trash.”
In my memory her voice was defensive and angry; why would it not have been? I’ve never told her how I felt, that it was so wrong of me to have said it. My friend is older than I am, she knows more than I do, and perhaps she knows—and she was raised a Congregationalist too—that we won’t speak of it. Perhaps she forgot. I don’t think she has.
—
This too:
Right after I found out about my college admission, I showed my high school English teacher a story I had written. I can remember very little of it, but I remember this: He had circled the word “cheap.” The sentence was something like “The woman wore a cheap dress.” Don’t use that word, he said, it is not nice and it is not accurate. I don’t know if he said that exactly—but he had circled the word and gently told me something about it that was not nice or good, and I have remembered that always.
“Say, Wizzle,” my mother said.
It was early morning. Cookie had been in, taken my temperature, asked if I wanted some juice. I said I would try the juice, and she left. In spite of my anger, I had slept. But my mother looked very tired. She seemed no longer angry, just tired, and more like the person she had been since she’d arrived to see me at the hospital. “Do you remember me talking about Mississippi Mary?”
“No. Yes. Wait. Was she Mary Mumford with all those Mumford girls?”
“Oh yes, you’re right! She married that Mumford fellow. Yes, all those girls. Evelyn in Chatwin’s Cake Shoppe used to talk about her, they were related somehow. Evelyn’s husband was a cousin, I don’t remember. But ‘Mississippi Mary,’ Evelyn called her. Poor as a church mouse. I got to thinking of her after we spoke of Elvis. She was from Tupelo too. But her father moved the family to Illinois—Carlisle—and that’s where she grew up. I don’t know why they moved to Illinois, but her father worked at the gas station there. Not a Southern accent on her. Poor Mary. But she was cute as the dickens, and she was the head cheerleader, and she married the captain of the football team, the Mumford boy, and he had money.”
My mother’s voice was rushed again, compressed.
“Mom—”
She waved a hand at me. “Listen, Wizzle, if you want a good story. Listen. Write this one up. So, Evelyn told me when I was in there talking about—”
“Marilyn Somebody.” We said this together, and my mother paused to smile; oh, I loved her, my mother!
“Listen. So Mississippi Mary married this rich fellow and had, oh, I don’t know, five or six girls, I think they were all girls, and she was a pleasant person and they lived on a big place where her husband ran his business, I don’t know what business it was— And her husband would take trips for his business, and it turned out that for thirteen years he was having an affair with his secretary, and the secretary was a fat thing, such a fat, fat thing, and Mary finally found out and she had a heart attack.”
“Did she die?”
“Nope. No, don’t think so.” My mother sat back, she looked exhausted.
“Mom. That’s sad.”
“Of course it’s sad!”
We were silent for a while. Then my mother said, “I only remembered her because she—well, all of this according to her cousin Evelyn at Chatwin’s—she loved Elvis, born in that same dump he came from.”
“Mom.”
“What, Lucy?” She turned and looked at me quickly.
I said, “I’m glad you’re here.”
My mother nodded and looked out the window again. “I’ve thought how strange it must be. Both Elvis and Mississippi Mary went from being so poor to being very wealthy—and it didn’t seem to have done either of them a damn bit of good.”
“No, of course not,” I said.
I have gone to places in this city where the very wealthy go. One place is a doctor’s office. Women, and a few men, sit in the waiting room for the doctor who will make them look not old or worried or like their mother. A few years ago I went there to not look like my mother. The doctor said that almost everyone came in the first time and said they looked like their mother and didn’t want to. I had seen my father in my face too, and she, the doctor, said, yes, she could help with that as well. Usually it was the mother—or the father—that people didn’t want to look like, often both, she said, but mostly it was the mother. She put tiny needles into the wrinkles by my mouth. You are beautiful now, she said. You look like yourself. Come back in three days and let me see.
Three days later in the waiting room was a woman who was terribly old, and she had a brace on her back, which was bent almost in half. She smiled from a face that had been made to look years younger. I thought she was brave. Beside me sat a young boy, perhaps in middle school, and his older sister. They may have been waiting for their mother—I don’t know who they were waiting for. But they were wealthy. You get to have a feel for this, even if I hadn’t been in this office of this doctor. I watched the young boy and his sister. They spoke of calling Pips, and the girl said, I can only call national numbers, I can’t call international on this phone. The boy was nice about that; he suggested a way to email Pips and have Pips call them. Then I watched this boy watch the very old lady, he watched her with interes
t, and yet because she was so bent over, she was for him of course a different species. This is how old she looked to him, I could see this; I felt I could see this. I loved the boy and his sister. They looked healthy and beautiful and good. And the very old lady took her leave, slowly. She had a bright pink ribbon tied to her cane.
The boy got up suddenly and opened the door for her.
This is some city. But I have already said that.
That night in the hospital, the last night my mother stayed with me—she had been there five days—I thought about my brother. I remembered then how I had come across a group of boys in the field by the school, I must have been about six years old, and I saw that there was fighting, that a kid was being hit by a group of boys. The boy being hit was my brother. His face looked like he was paralyzed with fear, and in fact he did not seem to move, he was crouched while these boys hit him. I saw this only briefly, because I turned and ran away. I thought too—that night in the hospital—how my brother had not had to go to the war in Vietnam because his number in the lottery was a good one. Before he found out, I remember hearing my parents speaking at night, and I heard my father say: The army will kill him, we can’t let it happen, the army will be terrible for him. And it was soon after that, we found out that my brother’s number was a good one. But my father loved him! I saw this that night.
And then I remembered this: There was a Labor Day when my father took me, alone—I don’t know why I was alone with him; I mean, I don’t know where my brother and sister were—to Moline, about forty miles away. Perhaps he had business there, though it is hard to imagine what possible type of business he had anywhere, let alone in Moline, but I do remember being there with him for the Black Hawk Festival, and we watched the dancing of the Indians. The Indian women stood in a circle around the men, and the women only took little steps while the men danced with much commotion. My father seemed keenly interested in watching the dancing and the festivities. There were candied apples for sale, and I wanted one desperately. I had never had a candied apple. My father bought one for me. It was an astonishing thing for him to have done that. And I remember that I couldn’t eat the apple, I couldn’t get my small teeth into the red crust, and I felt desolation, and he took it from me and he ate it, but his brow became furrowed, and I felt that I had caused him worry. I don’t remember watching the dancers after that, I remember watching only my father’s face, so high above me, and I saw his lips become reddish with the candied apple that he ate because he had to. In my memory I love him for this, since he did not yell at me, or make me feel bad for not being able to eat the apple, but took it from me, and ate it himself, even with no pleasure.