Home Another Way (16 page)
I was wrong.
After two weeks, I quit. I couldn’t take it anymore. I hadn’t practiced away my entire adolescence, skipping school dances and movies and make-out parties, to be entertaining a theater full of half-wits who couldn’t get tickets to
Cats
, and who hadn’t a single ounce of appreciation for my art. I refused to go on, day in and day out, and play the same trash over and over again. This was not my love’s music. It was the cadence of a quick fling in some drunk’s rusted-out Pontiac parked behind the bar—and I’d had plenty of those already.
“Earth to Sarah,” Jack said. “You look lost.”
“Sorry. Just thinking.”
“About what?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Try me.”
I hesitated. Every time Jack and I spoke, I tore off a piece of myself and gave it to him. Crumbs at first, and now chunks, a bit bigger. Eventually, if I let him, he’d have all of me. And no one had ever known me like that. A good boy like Jack Watson couldn’t handle seeing all the filth that churned around my soul.
“Not today,” I said, and I left, jeans still hanging over the radiator.
“Come on in,” Memory shouted from somewhere inside her house, after I knocked. I was greeted by the scent of cinnamon-oatmeal spoon bread—a kind of scoopable cake sweetened with raisins and brown sugar. She knew I liked it, and had a pan waiting for me every Sunday morning.
“Don’t know why you keep pounding on that door. It’s always open,” Memory said, galumphing into the kitchen as I dished the oatmeal into a bowl.
“Because it’s polite to knock before entering, just in case you’re not dressed or something. Aren’t you constantly reminding me of my lack of manners?”
“I ain’t walked around the house naked since I was three,” she said. “And there’s a dog’s egg chance I’ll ever do it again. Anyhoo, family don’t knock. And you’re family now.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good thing,” I said, mouth full of food. Memory whacked me on the back, and I coughed some oats onto the table.
“ ’Course it’s good,” she said with a chuckle. “Just as long as you don’t be calling me Mama.”
“There’s about a dog’s egg chance of me doing that,” I said, echoing one of her favorite expressions.
She squawked, “Girl, there’s hope for you yet,” and left with her Bible, porcine hips scraping the doorjamb.
I washed my bowl and, opening the cabinet to put it away, found an index card hunched tentlike on top of the stack of bowls. I unfolded it.
Don’t you be putting that bowl away wet,
it read in Memory’s hen scrawl. Snickering, I swiped the bowl with a dish towel.
It took me by complete surprise, how Memory and I had knotted ourselves together, one Sunday at a time, one argument at a time—knit one, purl two—until we’d tangled ourselves into some ugly granny-square afghan, with misshapen edges and dropped stitches throughout. In many ways, despite Memory’s earlier joke, we were like mother and daughter—albeit in a dysfunctional family sitcom, where the mother harassed the daughter about her grades and hairstyles and boyfriends, and the daughter stole money from her mother’s purse and filled her vodka bottles with water after sneaking some, but everyone hugged by half hour’s end.
When it was almost ten, I went to turn on the radio for Robert. He stared at the ceiling, blinking occasionally. When the introductory music began—an amateurish orchestral rendition of Beethoven’s famous Ninth Symphony—he opened and closed his mouth several times, like a carp, grunting, twitching. Once the preaching started, however, his eyes crossed slightly, and his head sunk into his shoulder.
I’d noticed this pattern a couple of weeks ago, and since Doc couldn’t tell me how pulpy Robert’s mind was, I decided to try an experiment of my own. I’d brought my violin.
“Robert. Robert,” I said, clapping my hands next to his ear. He didn’t respond, so I raised the violin and ran the bow over the strings. His head lolled in my direction. I began playing
Ode to Joy
while walking slowly around the room, and his eyes followed me. When I stopped, his eyes stopped and he sucked his tongue. I played the song again, faster this time, and he squealed, piglike, legs jerking sporadically.
I paced until Memory came home, hoping Robert’s response hadn’t been a well-timed fluke, or that he hadn’t used up the little brain juice he had left. I wanted this for her—a single minute of joy in the dreary, wasted hours that had become her life.
Memory stumped into the house, humming, carrying an aluminum-foil packet. “Who’s hungry?” she said, heading to the kitchen. “Got some deviled eggs from Reverend Watson. You think it’s fitting to eat deviled eggs on the Lord’s day?”
I met her in there. “I need to show you something,” I said, “in the den.”
“Is my boy all right?”
“Watch this.”
This time I played Bach—
Jesu, bleibet meine Freude
from Cantata 147—and Memory looked on, mouth agape, tears caught in the rolling folds of her face, as Robert followed me with his eyes.
She dropped to her knees with a thud; the lamp on the end table rattled unsteadily. “Oh, my precious Lord Jesus, what a gift. Thank you and praise you, heavenly Father. Oh, my boy. My boy,” she said, rocking slightly, one hand on the floor, the other raised, open-palmed, toward the ceiling.
She stayed there for some time, lips moving silently. I packed my violin and went to leave, but she said, “Wait, Sarah.” Jiggling to her feet, she took both Robert’s hands, covering them with kisses. He had fallen asleep.
“Sarah,” she said, but couldn’t finish. I watched her, crying, leaning over her son’s bed, back heaving, and thought I should give her a hug, or at least touch her shoulder. But my feet took me to the kitchen, and I sat in the gold vinyl-cushioned chair, listening to the sniffs and hiccups from the other room. Memory came in a few minutes later.
“Guess you need some lunch,” she said, wiping her eyes on the cuff of her flannel shirt. She fixed two bologna and mustard sandwiches on stale homemade bread and slid a plate in front of me. Then she filled a green Depression-era relish dish with pickles, slices of apple, deviled eggs, and Ritz crackers.
I chewed my sandwich. Memory sat back in her chair and said, “You figure that out all by yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“My boy, he weren’t never smart or nothing, kinda dingtoed and whatnot. And he had these spells where he would fall down and rattle around on the floor. But he was always a sweet boy. And he was all I got. His daddy run off not too long after he was born, which was fine by me, ’cause Bobby Atkinson was nothing but crowbait. Don’t know what I ever seen in him, ’cept he liked fat women, and he’d buy me beer even when I wasn’t legal. ’Course, that was before I met Jesus.”
“Doc said Robert has a brain injury?”
“The fool boy, he used to go out drinking with his buddies from the mill after work. ’Bout five years ago, he gone and crashed his car into a tree one night. Ended up like you see in there. Them doctors say he don’t know anything now, and maybe he don’t, but that ain’t make me any less his mama. They said to put him in a home and let some strangers worry ’bout him. But that ain’t what mamas do. They take care of their babies, no matter what. You’ll know what I mean one day.”
I stabbed a pickle and slid it around my plate, juice leaving a green trail, like snail slime. If I had been more like Memory, my own child would be alive now. Then again, my stillbirth was probably a gift from the gods—or, as Jack said, grace. Imagine me with a kid. I’d only screw it up. “I don’t think I’m cut out for the whole mothering thing.”
“You say that now, but just you wait until you meet the one who scrambles your insides.”
“No, not me.”
“Mm-hmm. I’m fat for sure, but I see fine, and I see how you look when you get talking ’bout that buck nun Reverend Watson.”
I twisted my napkin around my finger. Was it that obvious? How many other people knew? Beth hadn’t been treating me any differently, but Maggie did seem a bit distant at Christmas. And Jack? I needed to play cool for a few weeks. “That’s crazy,” I said.
“Maybe,” Memory said. “Maybe. All I’m saying is you ain’t as tough as you think you are. That’s a good thing, in case you was wondering. I know you been trying real hard not to get close to no one. But things ain’t always up to you, and sometimes you don’t got no choice in the matter.
“So, you gonna bring that fiddle of yours back next Sunday?”
I nodded because I couldn’t find my voice. Memory was right; I’d gotten soft over the winter. And the only thing I hated more than Memory being right was my father.
I drove home past Granger Pond. Skaters of all ages and shapes covered the ice. Five or six boys shot hockey pucks into a makeshift goal at one end; some teenage girls stood around a barrel fire, giggling and watching the boys. Families skated together in clusters, some with matching hats and mittens. I saw Beth and Dominic, gliding hand in hand.
It had been years since I’d tried ice-skating. But each time I passed the pond, I felt the inkling to try it again. The next time I stopped into the variety store, I decided, I’d buy some skates. And I’d go late at night to use them, when no one would see me stumble and fall on my face.
Memory grasped both of Robert’s wrists and tugged him forward. She wriggled his rugby-style shirt over his head and, before easing him back down into his pillow, covered the top half of the bed with a plastic shower curtain. Then she lifted his hips, stripped off his pants and diaper, and pushed another shower curtain under his legs. She hated to look at him undressed, all shriveled and bony, and stippled with moles. She thought of that song.
The leg bone’s connected to
the knee bone; the knee bone’s connected to the thighbone.
Robert’s bones hardly seemed connected to anything at all, loose and floppy like jellyfish tentacles. She’d never seen a live one, but as a child she took a book about sea jellies from the mobile library—a bus full of donated books that came through Jonah once a month between May and September—and she’d peed standing up for weeks, afraid one would swim up the toilet and sting her.
She remembered when she only had a plain, flat mattress, and had to lift her son’s limp weight unaided. The hospital bed—a gift from Luke Petersen—made it easier to bathe Robert. Clomping around the bed, Memory kicked the pot near her feet, and warm, soapy water sloshed onto the floor. She dipped the washcloth into it, wringing it out onto her son’s hair several times, until his head was wet enough to shampoo. After rinsing his hair, she gently massaged his skin clean, patted him dry, and rubbed baby lotion into his cracked elbows and knees. She stuffed towels around him, soaking up the extra water on the shower curtains. Then she rolled him onto one side and maneuvered him into his flannel pajama top, removing the wet towels and curtains before buttoning him up. She tugged his bottoms on over a clean diaper.
She bathed him twice a week, all she could manage now, and still, by the time she finished, she was wheezing and massaging the twinge behind her breastbone.
She was so tired.
Memory emptied the bathwater and refilled the pot, adding Epsom salts and five leftover Christmas peppermint candies. Sitting at the kitchen table, she stuck her feet into the hot water, soaking them until they puckered up like albino prunes. Then she got ready for bed, dragging her pillows and blankets out from the hall closet and throwing them on the couch. She hadn’t slept one night in her bedroom since Robert came home from the hospital after the accident, the den the only room that could accommodate both of them. But the couch wasn’t nearly wide enough for her. She slept sitting up, stacking pillows on a milk crate she used as an ottoman.
She read her Bible for a while. Then she pulled a paper sack of rag strips onto her lap, frowning at the unfinished rug. She’d been making it for Sarah, a gift for her, to take with her when she left in the spring. But it didn’t seem right now, all stormy blues and grays. Sarah wasn’t quite so thundery anymore.
Memory’s eyes welled as she recalled Robert following Sarah’s music around the room, and gave thanks again to God. She’d known her boy was still in there.
She felt another prick in her chest, and belched. A bout of indigestion, probably. Exertion immediately after eating always gave her heartburn, and bathing Robert was the most exercise she got these days. Still, each winter, when it took a little more effort to breathe, she wondered what would become of her boy if she could no longer care for him.
She shook off the thought. With Robert frail as he was, Memory was certain she’d outlive him.
Other than throwing the bachelorette bash—something Beth told me she didn’t want—I didn’t know what a maid of honor did. I had one at my wedding, one of David’s cousins, but she merely showed up that day to sign the marriage certificate and, clad in black velvet, stood next to me in the courtroom, holding a cheap bouquet from the gas station around the corner.
I didn’t even get a party out of her.
Maggie happily took over much of the planning. She buzzed from idea to idea, from wedding shower games to the reception menu, her to-do list growing faster than a field of dandelions.
