Never Coming Back(40)

“Seriously?” Brown said, admiration on his face. Respect for Tamar’s deviousness.

“Seriously.”

Blue Mountain appeared in my mind, standing over me in the Arts Center while I waited for my heart to revert. Is your mother proud of you? There was no question that Sunshine’s mother was proud of her. All you had to do was look at her in the photo on their wall, standing on that sun-kissed dock, a yellow cardigan tied over her shoulders, smiling down at Sunshine. She was like an ad for an affluent, white New England college mother.

“Look,” I said. “I was never a bad kid. I worked so hard—at school, at everything. And she kicked me out. I screamed at her, I mean screamed at her, the first time I ever did something like that. The only time. And we didn’t talk about that either, and then I went away to school the way she decreed, and then”—I stopped talking. Lump in my throat.

“And then what?” Brown said.

The hawk hovered above, silent and deadly, waiting for the mouse. I kept my hand pressed over the scorch mark.

“And I loved it,” I said. “I loved college. It was a whole new life and I loved it and I loved you guys and after a while it was in the rearview mirror, all of it. I left her behind.”

My mother and Asa had, in their separate ways, launched me into action. That was the way it felt.

“And I never went back,” I said. “My life is the opposite of my mother’s.”

“I don’t know about that,” Brown said.

Sunshine was silent, which meant that she agreed. Why? How? I was nothing like my mother, my mother in her lumber jacket, raising the maul in the air, bringing it down on chunks of log. My mother, with her beautiful voice, heading out to choir practice but never, not once, appearing in church. My mother, one hand on the steering wheel, driving me to New Hampshire and then driving back again alone.





* * *





Sunshine and Brown and their parents were all talkers. They sat around the dinner table late into the night, laughing, high-fiving when they agreed on something and raising their voices when they didn’t. They were voluble. They believed in both small talk and big talk. They were gracious and charming and diplomatic with guests in that upper-class way; their manners were impeccable and they knew how to make anyone feel at home. Including me.

Do you have to talk much, though, to know one another? Is that a given? My mother was not a talker. She was a woman of economical physical movement. See her in our house, the house that used to be ours, back in Sterns. See her at the table, watching the birds at her bird feeder. See her hanging clothes out on the clothesline that she herself strung between two two-by-fours that she herself dug the holes for and then cemented into the ground. See her tossing firewood into those big, messy piles on the porch, and see me lecturing her on how it needed to be stacked in neat rows instead.

My mother was a no-nonsense type. A woman who worked and worked and worked and wouldn’t answer most of the questions I kept asking her, then made me go far away to college. Threw me out of the house and out of the state, was how it felt at the time, unlike most of my high school friends. The mothers of those friends had always been with them. These friends married one another. They lived now in Sterns and their children went to Sterns Elementary. Some of those children were already in Sterns Middle School. Sterns High, even. All of this I knew from reading the Sterns alumni newsletter.

“Do you have any kids, Clara?”

This was a question I heard a lot at the mixer before the one Sterns High School reunion I had gone to, our tenth.

“I don’t, no.”

Later in the evening, after a few drinks and a few hours: “Do you want any kids?”

No, I don’t? Maybe, if I meet the right guy? I haven’t thought much about it, to be honest? Minefields, all of them. Either You don’t know what you’re missing, or Have you tried online dating because my cousin met her husband that way, or There’s not much time left, is there? Don’t miss your chance, now. Tick-tock tick-tock. Gene mutation, were you in there? Were you listening? Maybe there was no chance at all.

Me to Tamar, late at night after I drove back from that reunion: “Why does it matter if I want kids or not? Why does anyone care?”

“It’s not whether or not you want kids,” she said. “It’s that children are the ultimate defense weapon.”

“What does that even mean, Ma?”

“You know what it means.”

End of subject. The Fearsome had spoken. But I did know what she meant. From the outside looking in, which was where I was then and now, it took all your energy to raise a child, and all your money and all your time. So you couldn’t for a minute think about whether the toll was too great. You walked around wearing the fact of your children like a shield, like armor, like a permanent excuse. You had no choice but to believe it was worth it.

My mother was not a woman of small talk. She was also not a woman of big talk, if big talk was defined as the kind that Sunshine’s and Brown’s parents were so good at, long evenings of expansive conversation with others who wanted to talk about string theory, maybe, or the California school of plein air painters, or whether a socialist female governor could ever win a presidential election.

Say it once and mean it. Provide no explanation or context.

Those were the rules according to Tamar, not that she would ever have put them into words that way. Putting my mother into words was the job of the one she called the word girl. My mother didn’t hide behind me, then or now. She made no excuses for herself, then or now. She called things as she saw them, then and now.