It was a fear that had grown out of my need to understand my dear Pap, and yet I couldn't understand. What had happened to him? Why was he born slow? Why couldn't he be like everyone else's father, like my friend Tim Seeley's father? How could it happen? How could I stop it, change it, fix it?
I thought I could order the world, write it down on a piece of paper and file it away. Then Grandma Mary died. I dumped all my index cards, sixteen packed file boxes' worth, into the garbage. I realized life was all about randomness and chaos.
Mam continued to ignore us those first few days after she came home from the hospital. She acted restless. I'd see her pacing in front of her bedroom window, standing beneath the crucifix over her doorway, staring at it for long periods of time, and then wandering outside to stare at Pap's holes, scooping up the birdseed he'd dumped in them from Grandma Mary's forty-pound bag, and running it through her fingers. She took long walks and wouldn't say where she was going or when she'd be back. Worst of all, though, she'd race to the phone every time it rang, and I knew who she was waiting for. I'd seen it when I'd visited Mam at the hospital her last week there. I'd seen the way she'd get when it was time for Dr. Morris to visit.
"Hand me my makeup bag, would you, JP," she'd say, setting aside a well-read copy of Philadelphia magazine. Then she'd pull out her mirror and look at herself, powdering the freckles on her face, smoothing down her red hair, shaping it on her shoulders just so, and adding another coat of lipstick to her lips.
"What are you getting yourself all dolled up for him for?" I asked her once. "Why should he care what you look like? He's just your doctor."
Mam was still dabbing at herself, holding the mirror higher and closer to get a better look. "He's lifted my spirits the past couple of weeks, the very least I can do now that I'm feeling better is make myself presentable."
I didn't like it. I didn't like the way her eyes shone when he entered the room, or the new familiar way they talked to each other. He called her Erin and she called him Mike. Mike Morris, built like a soccer player, had dark curly hair, bushy brows, and broad hands with fingers that seemed to touch Mam too often and linger on her arm, her shoulder, way too long. He had a way of looking at her that I'm sure wasn't professional. His brown-black eyes studied her, stayed on her face so long it made me squirm and sweat. There were three other patients in the room with Mam, but when Dr. Morris was there, you'd never know it. She had me draw the curtain, for privacy, she said, for when he listened to her heart—another thing he did way too often, all of a sudden.
I felt like a helpless kid, dancing around the bed, talking too much, interrupting their conversations, sitting on the bed next to Mam so that Dr. Morris wouldn't. I talked about Pap as if he and I were just having the greatest time at home together. I brought up stories, Mam and Pap stories. "Hey, Mike"—if Mam were going to be familiar, so was I—"did you ever hear about how my mother and father got together? It's a sweet story, it really is."
Mike told Mam about the opera Tosca, which was playing in town that next month, and right in front of me he said, "We'll have to go, Erin. It's always nice to have an opera buddy. I hate to go alone, don't you?"
"Oh, she hears operas all the time, don't you, Mam?" I said, jumping into the conversation before Mam could give her answer. "Yeah, she and Pap play tapes and dance all over the house to the operas, don't you, Mam? Tell him. Tell him how Pap will grab you and say, 'I love you, I love you, I love you,' a million times."
I had hoped Mam's infatuation would end when she left the hospital, but it didn't. It was as if she were walking around holding her breath all the time, only letting it out when the phone rang, then holding it again when the caller wasn't who she'd hoped it would be.
His call came three days after she got home. I stood close by, at the kitchen window, pretending to watch Pap staring up at the Nativity set while Mam talked, chattered, laughed, played with her hair, and said a couple of times, her voice lowered, "I can't talk about that now, I'll let you know later."
Finally, after several days of this kind of call, I figured it was time to have it out with Mam, to make it clear that she was a married woman and if she didn't like who she'd married, it was her own fault.
Mam sat at the kitchen table and listened to me rant, her hands folded in her lap and her ankles crossed, her feet tucked halfway under her chair. She acted patient with me, the way she often did with Pap, and this infuriated me even more.
"Okay," I said. "I can see you're not listening to me. You're treating me like Pap, but you're the one acting like him. You're the one who looks foolish, not me."
Mam coughed and closed her eyes a long minute. Then she opened them and said, "Come on, let's go on back to your grandmother's room a second."
She took my hand, but I pulled it away. "No, you go on and get what you need, I'll wait here," I said.
"I don't need anything. I just wanted to talk to you."
"I thought we were talking. Why are you trying to change the subject? Why do we need to go to her room?"
"Because her room will become your room. You're finally going to get your own room, a real room."
"No. Why? I like the room I have now. I like sleeping on the porch. I've never complained, have I? I don't want Grandma Mary's room."
Mam took a few seconds to look around the kitchen. She blinked her eyes several times and I saw the tears welling up. "JP, every room is Grandma Mary's room. This is Grandma Mary's house. Look at these stenciled cabinets, those lacy curtains—they're all hers, they're all her. You can't live in her old room, JP, and I can't live in her house. Do you understand?"
"No." I backed away from her. "What do you mean? You don't want to move, do you? That's not what you're saying, right? You want to change things some, change the wallpaper or—or the curtains." I looked around the kitchen at all of Grandma Mary's things, and I couldn't imagine the room any other way, with any other wallpaper, any other cabinets. I thought to myself how this was her house. I could still feel her presence in every room. I could smell her fresh-brewed coffee, her peach turnovers, her molasses cookies. The smells had wafted into every room, into every corner and crevice in the house, and settled on the carpets and curtains like a mist. They were there in the house forever, Grandma Mary was there—and that was all the more reason not to leave, not to move. We couldn't move. Where would we go?
"We've got to move, JP," Mam said, breaking into my thoughts. "I've thought about it, and it's the only right thing I know how to do."
"But it isn't right. You've lived in this neighborhood all your life, and Pap—Pap's lived right here, right in this house. How will he survive without—This is all he knows. This is my house, too. 1 was born here."
"JP, let me tell you something. When I married your pap—well, I married your pap because I loved him. I love dear Pap very much, you know that. But you see, I had been sick, I had been afraid, and I knew a safe place. Here. This was the safe place, with Pap and Mary. It was home because she was home. She created such a haven for us, for all of us, and Pap and I—we've lived like children, we've never had to grow up, have we?" She looked at me, her head tilted, a sad, please-understand-me expression on her face.
She continued, "Then you, JP, you came along and I thought, Now, now I'll have to grow up, learn to cook, learn to be a mother. But Mary took care of that, too. She was your mother and I was your friend, your best friend. 'Just you and me, JP,' remember? Remember how I used to say that to you?"
I didn't answer her.
Mam sighed. "I think Mary was just happy to let me take over playing with Pap, the everyday playing with Pap, and I've been happy to do it. I wanted to play, to spend my days outdoors with Pap and do all the things I missed out on when I was growing up. So that's what I've done. But then—well, then your grandmother dies, doesn't she? And here we are. Here we are without her."
Mam took my hand again and pulled me toward the hallway. "Come here, I want to show you something."
"I don't want to go in her ro
om," I said, leaning away from her.
"No, not her room, the living room." I followed Mam and she took me to the closet where Grandma Mary kept the vacuum cleaner. Mam opened the door and next to the vacuum were a pair of Grandma Mary's shoes. A pair of navy pumps, the shoes she died in, though Mam had had her buried in her white ones to match her favorite dress. I stepped back from the closet.
"I put them in here," Mam said. "I couldn't look at them. More than anything else in the house, her shoes make me the saddest They're waiting for her, for her feet, and I'm waiting, too, for her to fill them again—because you see, James Patrick, I can't I can't fill them and I know—I know you want me to, expect me to. Everyone expects me to, and I can't"
I shook my head and Mam nodded back at me. "Oh yes, JP, I've noticed you watching me, hating me almost. We were friends, you and I, but now what? What are we now to each other? I don't know how to be your mother. You want me to bake and say motherly things and knit sweaters and cook dinners just like Mary's, but I can't. I don't know how to cook. I never learned. I never had to learn."
Mam closed the door, and I stuffed my hands down in my back pockets. I didn't want her dragging me somewhere else that I didn't want to go.
"We need a fresh start, JP, and I have a plan. A really marvelous plan."
Chapter Four
"I'LL BE RIGHT BACK," Mam said, leaving me standing in front of the living room closet. I closed the door and waited for Mam. When she returned she had in her hands the Philadelphia magazine she'd thumbed to death back at the hospital. She flipped it open to a page in the back. "Read this," she said, handing it to me.
*CONTEST. Send $200 and a 500-word essay: Why I want to own this house. 1840s stone farmhouse, slate roof, 6 bedrooms, 4 fireplaces, country kitchen, LR, DR, parlor, two-story sunporch all glass, some repair required, overlooking woods, small cabin, close to town—New Hope, PA. Winner announced Aug. 1.
I looked up from the ad. Mam's eyes danced, her face beamed like a child's. And I felt old, as old as Grandma Mary.
I handed her back the magazine. "This isn't real, Mam. This is one of those come-ons. You'd just be throwing two hundred dollars down the drain. Sorry. We'll get used to it here. I'll move into Grandma Mary's room and we'll be all right again, you'll see. You can learn to cook. All of the recipes are in her file, and—"
"No, JP," Mam interrupted. "No! I've already mailed off my essay. I mailed it yesterday, with the two hundred dollars. I wrote it in the hospital." Mam blushed. "Mike helped me. See, I've already made plans. That's what I wanted to tell you, what I couldn't talk to Mike about over the phone because I hadn't told you yet. He's going to send out a real estate agent tomorrow. He's going to help us sell this place, and we're going to move into that farmhouse."
"Mam! That's crazy. I can't believe Dr. Mike didn't stop you. Even if this thing's for real, what makes you think you'll win? You've just thrown away two hundred dollars. And what do you think 'some repair required' means? The place is a dump!" I spun away from her. "I can't believe this! I can't believe this! What are we going to do way out in New Hope? My school is here, your work's in Philadelphia. New Hope's at least an hour away from here. I can't believe this!"
Mam let me rant on, and the next day and the day after she let me sulk—while a couple of real estate agents walked through our home, while one man came out to make an estimate on the cost of fixing up the yard and another to make an estimate on painting the house. She told Pap her plans and the two of them locked arms and jumped up and down in the kitchen, and for the millionth time I wished Grandma Mary were still alive. They thought nothing about the reality of the situation. Mam acted as if she already owned the farmhouse, telling neighbors where we were moving, describing the house but not showing them the ad or the picture; she didn't want any more competition. She began to clean out our rooms, all except Grandma Mary's bedroom. She said she couldn't bring herself to go through all of that yet, and I said I thought she was probably feeling guilty.
"You go in her room and she's in there. You know it, you can feel it. You know she's angry."
"JP, that's nonsense," Mam said. "That's ghost talk and I don't believe in ghosts. I'm not feeling guilty at all."
Meanwhile the painter came and slopped white paint on our house. The house had always been yellow, but Dr. Mike's real estate agent said white would sell better, so they painted it white. The yardman dug up our whole yard, turning over the earth, planting grass seed, blocking off the area with a foot-high fence and a sign saying KEEP OFF. Pap ignored the sign and the fence, walking there often and lying out on the dirt every evening to look at the Nativity. He'd come in later with clumps of dirt dropping off his backside as he walked, and smelling of manure. Mam bought him a folding beach chair and told him to set it out on the sidewalk so the grass could grow; we couldn't live in the big stone farmhouse if the lawn here didn't look nice.
Then Larry Seeley, my good friend Tim's druggie brother, started hanging around Mam. He had been living in the city, but while Mam was in the hospital he'd come back home, claiming he was clean. Then his parents kicked him back out of the house when Mr. Seeley caught him in the bathroom popping some pills. I guess he had nowhere to go, so he came to our house. He sat in Grandma Mary's kitchen, puffing away on his cigarette, flipping back his long hair, or pulling on the strands of denim around the holes in his jeans, and talked to Mam about vegetarianism as if it were some kind of religion. He talked about cruelty to animals, fats and hormones and other serious problems associated with eating meat, and brought over some vegetarian cookbooks from the library.
Within a few short days, he had convinced Mam that meadess was the way to go. We became lacto-ovo vegetarians, which meant we drank milk and ate eggs but no meat, poultry, or fish. Mam started cooking us all kinds of tofu and seaweed foods Larry recommended, and I couldn't decide if Mam was a bad cook or the food just didn't taste good. But I did know that I didn't appreciate Larry butting into our business.
Mam had bought a wok to cook in instead of using Grandma Mary's frying pans, and a food processor to take the place of Grandma Mary's mixer, and I asked her how we could suddenly afford all these purchases, how we were going to pay the painter and the yardman when she hadn't even gone back to work. Mam said we had lots of insurance money from Grandma Mary.
We were using her money to buy our way out of her house. The whole thing seemed wrong to me.
When Aunt Colleen found out what was going on, she came over to set Mam straight.
"I hate to say it," she said, "but next to marrying Patrick, this has to be the stupidest thing you've ever come up with."
Mam took a sip of her coffee, nibbled on a fortune cookie, then folded her hands back in her lap. She was giving her the Dear Pap treatment, patient, waiting, letting Aunt Colleen have her say.
"Really! A house in New Hope. Do you think they'll just give you a house for two hundred dollars? The whole thing is rigged. They collect the money from a few thousand people from all over the country, and then they give the house to a relative. Honestly, baby, you haven't got a prayer.
"Now, there are some cute little houses in Langhorne I could show you. Little Capes that are just as charming as can be."
Mam shook her head. "No, I'll take the stone farmhouse in New Hope."
Aunt Colleen stamped her foot. "But that's just it. You can't take it. No one's going to give it to you. You think it's just that easy? You think people hand over big old farmhouses every day, because you want one? You've got to earn it. You've got to go out and earn the money. You can't just sit here expecting everything to be handed to you. Mary O'Brien's dead. Our parents are dead, and our only brother's a monk locked up miles away from here. You're not going to be coddled anymore, Erin. It's time you woke up."
Dear Pap came into the house then and heard Aunt Colleen's voice. "It's Colleen!" he cried. He shuffle-ran into the living room and hugged Colleen, squeezing her around her arms and waist. Aunt Colleen squirmed in his arms, trying to break free
. She made a face as if he smelled bad.
"Patrick, that's enough. I'm so very glad to see you, but that's enough." Pap let go of her and she pulled down her suit jacket and fussed with the bracelets on her wrists. "You need to learn to control your emotions better, Patrick. Do you know what emotions are?"
Aunt Colleen always tried to teach Pap something when she saw him. I believed she thought if she could just get hold of him for a couple of weeks she could turn him into a genius.
Mam told Pap to have a seat and help himself to a couple of cookies. Pap sat down and dug right in. He loved this new discovery of the fortune cookie. He hated the taste, said they tasted like soap, but he loved the fortunes. One day he got into the cellophane bag and broke open all the cookies, jammed the fortunes down in the pocket of his khakis, and claimed he had the most good luck in all the world. Mam said she wasn't going to buy another bag until every last broken cookie was eaten, so Pap got me to eat them all. Since then I've never cared much for the cookies or the fortunes.
Aunt Colleen watched Pap grab a handful of the cookies, examine them, and then put all but two back. She shook her head and said she had to leave.
"But think about what I said, Erin," she added, scurrying stiff-legged in her narrow skirt to the front door. "You could buy yourself a nice little home, a real step up from this place. I agree with you there, you do need to move. This neighborhood's been going downhill for years."
Even though she was somewhat on my side about the house issue, I felt glad to see her leave, and so did Mam. But still, Aunt Colleen was better than what came after her. The real estate agent set the FOR SALE sign up in our yard and we had a steady stream of nosy people touring our home.