Flying Lessons & Other Stories(29)
“No way!” shouted my dozens of cousins, and we circled my Uncle Kenneth for one big Choctaw hug.
Main Street
JACQUELINE WOODSON
Autumn now. The leaves here in New Hampshire are the ones on postcards—bright red and heartbreaking gold, color so deep and intense it seems it doesn’t belong in nature. They sell the postcards at the pharmacy on Main Street and tourists buy tons of them, scribbling things like Gorgeous here and Right out of Our Town and Bringing you home some maple syrup and I can imagine living here one day. Celeste said that’s how her mother found Peterborough. She had come up with a busload of people wanting to see the leaves turn colors. And she said to herself, Maybe one day I’ll live here. Celeste said, Maybe she was so busy looking at the colored leaves, she didn’t look around to see that the leaves were the ONLY color in this town!
—
There’s a coffee shop on Main—right next to the pharmacy. Even though egg creams weren’t always on the menu, the people coming here to look at the leaves kept asking for them so the owner finally added them and people coming from the city drink them by the gallon and write their postcards. I haven’t learned to like the egg creams, but I sit at the coffee shop some days, drinking Cokes and looking over people’s shoulders to watch them write the same things—over and over and over. Sometimes I think I’ll see Celeste getting out of a car and running into the drugstore with her mother. But Celeste is gone now. This town is both completely different—and absolutely the same—without her.
—
Last winter the snow fell so long and rose so high, my father hired a man from Keene to plow it. When the man arrived, his huge plow moved silently through the mass of snow. The silence surprised me. How could so much power exist inside such quiet? As I watched, pressing my head against the window, I said to my father, I want to move through the world that quietly. That powerfully.
—
Where did you come from? my father said, his eyes at once laughing and worried.
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I had a mother once, I said into the pane. She used to say things.
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Don’t say that, my father said. You still do. Don’t ever say that.
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But he is wrong. I don’t have a mother anymore. It’s just my father now. And the leaves. And the snow.
—
And the memory.
—
There are things you’re not allowed to say. When I was very young, it was the curses I’d heard my mother use, the words erupting from her mouth but disconnected—too ugly to belong to someone as beautiful as my mother. One morning, I stood in front of the mirror, saying the words over and over. My father found me this way. Neither of us knew that exactly eight days from that moment, my mother would move on to the next place. We thought the doctors were wrong. We prayed, Please, doctors, in the name of our Holy Father, be wrong.
—
What are you saying? my father said when he heard me. Don’t ever say those words. Ever.
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But Mama says them.
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She’s in pain, my father said. Those words should only be said by people in pain.
—
I wanted to tell him I was in pain. I wanted to show him where it hurt. Point to my head, my heart, my belly. Say, Here, Daddy. And here. And here. But I didn’t. I was eight years old. He would say I was too young to know real pain. After all, he’d say, you’ve never even had a skinned knee, Treetop! Then rub my head and smile that halfway real, halfway crying smile. That winter, I hurt every place my mother hurt. As I pressed wet cloths to her sweating forehead, as I let her hold my hand to wait out the pain, as I read to her from gossip magazines and gently brushed her thinning hair, each twist of pain moving through her moved through me. I wanted to tell my father this—that once I had lived inside my mother, a part of her. I wanted to say, How could I NOT know her pain?
What kind of name is Treetop, anyway? Celeste asked the first time she heard my father call me this. We were nine years old, and Celeste was my new best friend. She had moved to New Hampshire from New York City. She was tall and brown and beautiful. Her mother had modeled for magazines.
—
The first time I asked him where babies came from, he said Treetops.
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Celeste squinted, pulled her lips to the side. I had practiced doing this in the mirror, but it never looked all the amazing things hers looked.
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You know that’s not true, right?
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Yeah. Of course. But the name stuck.
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My dad would never say that, Celeste told me. He’d say Look it up. But he’d never call me Look It Up. Just saying.
—
We laughed. From the moment we became friends, it seemed we spent so much of our time laughing.
—
She told me her father spent his days figuring out what to do with other people’s money. He likes counting it, she said. And recounting and recounting. He’s tall like me, she said. She said her parents were taking a break from each other. After all, eleven years is a long time to be together, don’t you think?
—
I shrugged. When my mother died, she and my father had been together twenty years. They had been middle school sweethearts. My father said he couldn’t imagine living without her.