Never Coming Back(23)

“You’re a writer,” the doctor said, encouragingly. He pointed at the book I had brought for her that week, Little House in the Big Woods, as if to prove his point. “This assignment might not be as hard for you as it is for other people, to follow your mother wherever she goes. Writers have good imaginations, right? Isn’t it part of the job description?”

The aide, Sylvia, the Life Care specialist and the director all pursed their lips and nodded. They sat in a row, all four of them, pursing and nodding as if this were community theater and they were the Greek chorus.

“It is,” I said. “It’s part of the job description.”

At that, they nodded and pursed even harder, quickening their pace. Wind-up Greek chorus dolls that someone had just snuck up behind and cranked up a notch.

“Oh, yes,” Sylvia said. “You’ll be great at that, Clara.”

She smiled at me. It was a real smile, a smile that said she knew I was worried about not doing a good job. As if I were a child getting ready to head to Syracuse to the state spelling bee, a child who had practiced for weeks, asking anyone—meaning Tamar—to read out the words from the practice book and use each in a sentence if necessary. As if I were my former self, Sterns Elementary spelling champ, and my mother were her former self too, Tamar Winter, the tough-as-nails mother of the champ.





* * *





“Autochthonous.”

“Could you please use it in a sentence?”

That was what I used to say to Tamar, back in my elementary school spelling bee champion days. Asking to use the spelling word in a sentence was a ploy, a stall. If you didn’t know how to spell a word, staring into space while the word was used in a sentence as your brain sifted through a thousand possibilities to find the right one was an excellent strategy. I used to ask in a polite, distant, measured tone of voice, as if Tamar were an official state spelling bee judge.

“No, Clara, I can’t use this word in a sentence, because I don’t know what the hell this word means. I don’t even know how to pronounce this goddamn word.”

That was her usual response. A Tamar remark. But the few seconds it took her to go through the rant was usually enough time for me to take a stab at how to spell the word.

“Autochthonous. A. U. T. O. C. H. T. H. O. N. O. U. S.”

“Correct. Do you have any idea what it means?”

“No. How the hell would I?”

“Don’t curse.”

“You curse.”

“Do as I say, not as I do. I’m your mother.”

“Who cares what it means, Ma? Why does that matter? All that matters is spelling it right. Onward.”

That was a lie, though. I cared. Even back then, I cared.

“Hi, Ma. It’s Clara.”

I always told her who I was these days, just in case. I put my hand on the walker handle, next to hers but not touching. Tamar was never big on touching. She was pushing her walker up and down the hall outside the dining room. The hallway was decorated with removable decals: blocky branched trees with stylized birds fluttering up into the fluorescent-ceiling sky. Flowers drooping on stems. Apples and pears and cherries. Every decal was a replication of something that lived and thrived only outside.

“Hello, Clara.”

“Where are you going today, Ma?”

“Choir practice.”

“At the Twin Churches?”

She stopped walking and looked directly at me. “Where the hell else?”

That was Tamar. That was a Tamar thing to say. She was there, she was right there with me, the daughter who never stopped asking dumb questions. The look on her face would wither a lesser woman. Let me not be a lesser woman.

“I don’t know, Ma. Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, maybe?”

She shook her head and shooed me away with her hand. Annoyed. But I wasn’t going anywhere and neither was she. It was a Wednesday night in upstate New York, and it was my job to follow my mother wheresoever she went, and where she was going was choir practice, just like she did every week for thirty-two years despite the fact that she never went to church.

It was practice only, for my mother. A lifetime of practice.

There was a time when she wanted to leave upstate New York, desperately wanted to, but she got no farther than a party in Utica.

Autochthonous was an adjective. It meant formed or originating in the place where it was found. Autochthonous meant native. Autochthonous was the definition of my mother, Tamar Winter, formed and found in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. I thought back to those nights when she was pretending to be the spelling bee judge and I was pretending to be the spelling bee contestant, each of us needling the other, sitting there at the kitchen table, and I thought, Was that the time in my life when everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt, and I didn’t even know it?

She stopped pushing the walker and touched my arm just below the elbow, where the wire began.

“What’s this?” she said, and she pushed the sleeve higher, twisting my arm, trying to see the whole tattoo.

“I got it when I was twenty-five,” I said. “Right after Asa died.”

“Asa,” she said, and the sound of his name in her voice made my heart pound. Again. “What happened with you and Asa?”

“He died, Ma.”