In Search of Eden (12 page)

The living room clock struck two, and Dorrie came back to the here and now. She did a few chores, then went into the kitchen and started supper, but Mama came down, lugging her portable oxygen and obviously sick, decided Dorrie wasn't seasoning the pork chops right, and took things over. Dorrie finished setting the table and then went out onto the porch. It was cold for Nashville in February.

A plane came in on the approach to the airport and created a racket for a minute or two. This had been a nice neighborhood once, and it still was, in Dorrie's mind. The yards were neat and tidy and the flower beds weeded and kept, but Mama didn't like the skin tone of the neighbors who had moved in around them. Mama would have moved if she'd had the money, but she didn't, so she just kept to herself and considered herself better than her neighbors.

“Good afternoon, Miranda.” Mr. Cooper emerged from his house, and he nodded in his courtly way. He was tall, dark, and lean, but his face had worn and his hair faded in the years she had known him. He refused to call her Dorrie.
“Miranda was your name when your daddy brought you over and introduced us when you were three days old, and Miranda you'll stay,”
he'd said. She liked Mr. Cooper. Sometimes she went over and sat and visited with him, and he fixed her a cup of coffee or a glass of sweet tea. She usually went when Mama was at work or, lately, when Mama was resting. His wife had died a few years back, and the occasion of her death was one of the few times she had openly defied her mother.

“You're not going to that colored church,”
Mama had said.

She hadn't answered but had marched right out the door and to the funeral and even back to Mr. Cooper's house afterward for the wake. Mama had pouted for a week, and to tell the truth, Dorrie had been surprised at how few consequences Mama really had to wield on her. She supposed she obeyed now more out of habit than anything else. That, and a lack of any better ideas.

“Hello there, sir,” she answered back to Mr. Cooper now. “Are you staying warm?”

“Oh yes, ma'am,” he assured her. “How is your mother these days?” Always generous and polite in spite of Mama's meanness.

“About like you'd expect,” she said simply.

He nodded, face grave. He was probably remembering his wife's suffering. “I'm off to prayer meeting, where I'll remember her. Come on and go with me.”

Dorrie smiled. She could imagine what prayer meeting at Mr. Cooper's church was like. It was the Holiness Revival Pentecostal something or other, and even the funeral she'd attended there had been more lively than her usual Sunday experience with the Methodists. The preacher at the Methodist church Mama belonged to was a burdened man who spent hours describing historical detail and translations and Greek tenses. His idea of application was a list of instructions delivered with the resigned air of someone who knew his flock would be defeated even before setting out. It was a sorry affair, and as soon as she'd turned eighteen, she had stopped going.

“I guess I'll stay on here,” she said with a smile.

“Well.” He tipped his hat and got into his car, an old Chevy Impala that he washed as religiously as he read his Bible. His wife's ancient Cadillac was still lovingly parked beside it.

She held up a hand as he drove away; then she huddled on the porch and watched the cars stream by until Mama called her in to supper.

It was a quiet meal. Mama seemed to have lost a little more of her starch. Dorrie guessed it was taking all her grit just to take the next breath. She ate the pork chops, seasoned very well
indeed, the rice, sticky the way Mama liked and made it, the green salad, and the butterbeans and politely declined banana pudding, earning a frown from Mama. But her mother would be equally critical if she gained weight.

“What are you saving your appetite for? Got something better coming up?”

Mama was always hoping she would have a date. She shook her head, and Mama didn't disappoint.

“You need to find yourself a man, Dorrie, and settle down,” she said, and oddly, instead of the usual aggravation she felt, Dorrie was touched. Suddenly she didn't see Mama's interfering as pushiness but as one more way of ordering things before her departure. Proof that Mama must care for her in her own strange way.

“I know,” she said.

“You know I'm dying.” Mama lifted her face up to Dorrie, and all Dorrie's glib reassurances died on her lips.

She nodded. “I know.”

“If I knew you were taken care of, I could go to my grave in peace.”

Dorrie wished she could finally do something to please her mother. She had meandered around her life long enough. Wasn't it about time she put down some roots and bore some fruit? She thought of children then, of warm, sticky babies and chubby toddlers and gangly boys and long-legged girls with missing teeth and freckles. They could be hers. She would do it. Why shouldn't she have a life? Why shouldn't she? She wasn't trash, and the fact that Mama wanted this for her proved it.

The only sound was Mama's labored breathing, and she was somewhat surprised that her thoughts were not making shuttered little clicks the way a camera or a slide projector will do, for she was seeing her future flash before her, and it was not an altogether bad thing. Oh, it was not the grand adventure she had thought her life would be, nor the endless romance, but whose life turned out like that, after all? It wasn't a perfect world. This was reality,
as she had been so often reminded. This was lesson one in the school of hard knocks. Take what you can get and be happy to get it. After all, it's probably more than you deserve.

She got up and began clearing off the table. She scraped the dishes, then put the food away while Mama washed. Mama stood there at the sink and washed every one of those dishes, even though Dorrie knew she must be tired. Dorrie tried to take over the job, but nobody but Mama could wash the dishes well enough. Dorrie could hear her breathing, a slight wheeze as her hands moved efficiently, rubbing the rag across every visible surface of every dish, bowl, and glass.

“I need some time alone tonight, Dora Mae,” her mother finally said.

Dorrie looked at her in surprise. “I can stay in my room,” she said.

“No. I mean really alone.”

“Okay. I'll call Aunt Bobbie and see if I can stay with her.” She had a horrible thought. “But why?” she asked, a tone of suspicion creeping into her voice.

Her mother's mouth tightened in anger. “Since when do I need to explain myself to you?” She pulled herself up and glared at her daughter. “Don't worry,” she said, looking annoyed. “I'm not going to take all my pills and be dead on the sofa when you get home. I
despise
a coward.”

What would life be like without her? Dorrie wondered as she went to call Aunt Bobbie. She felt a little surge but would not, absolutely would not, call it hope. She shoved the feeling away quickly, guiltily, feeling as if she had somehow hastened her mother's demise by thinking these traitorous thoughts.

chapter
10

N
oreen worked through that night with an energy some might say was unnatural. She supposed it
was
flying in the face of nature for a woman with stage four lung cancer to be tearing things up and washing things down, but it gave her a grim satisfaction and eased her anxiety to do so. She had never been one to think much about the past, but lately she'd been feeling like something big was bearing down on her, something that wanted to grab her and make her admit to things. She felt fear, almost panic when she thought of looking it in the eye. Once you started admitting to things, there would be no end to it, would there? That's how things came unraveled. That's how people lost control.

She shook her head as she squirted Windex on the pane of glass in the front door and rubbed it until it squeaked. She had never been one to go weepy and regretful, and she wasn't about to start now, she vowed with grim fierceness. And all this cleaning and sorting and throwing things out was making her feel better, so she went to it with a vengeance.

Halfway through scouring the bathroom walls she had a strange thought, and it slowed her down for a minute. She was
put in mind of those criminals they always showed on
Forensic Files
or
CSI
wiping down the scene of the crime. She thought about that as she scrubbed out the inside of the medicine cabinet and threw away old prescriptions and half-used tubes of ointment. She tore into the shower grout with Clorox and a stiff-bristled brush and felt like some murderer scrubbing away fingerprints so that no trace—none whatsoever—would be left behind.

But there were no police after her. She had been scrupulous all her life about obeying the law, she thought with pride. No, the thing that spurred her on was not some detective seeking out bloodstains or hidden bodies but the thought of her daughter, dark head bent in concentration, scrutinizing her life after she was gone and passing judgment on it. She tightened her lips with a simmering anger and set to work again. She would not have it. She had never allowed criticism in life, and she would not abide it in death, either.

She finished with the bathroom, then went through her old bank statements and canceled checks—still saved from the days when they sent them to you every month. They went into the pile for the burning bin. She sorted through her clothes and dispatched most of them to the porch for the Salvation Army pickup tomorrow. She set aside her nicest cream-colored suit and pinned a note to the lapel saying that she should be buried in it. She put her pearl earrings and necklace in a Ziploc bag and pinned it underneath the note, found a Wal-Mart bag and put in it a new package of panty hose, her new bra and slip and panties and her beige pumps, but only after checking to see that there were no scuffs or nicks in the leather. She left her purse on the floor beside it. Were people buried with purses? She wasn't sure, but she'd never gone anywhere without her pocketbook. She went through her dresser drawers and threw out all the old slips and nylons, all the old panties with their pulled elastic.

She sorted through each room of her small house in that fashion. The kitchen, the dining room, the living room. She sorted through the bookshelf. She set aside the three or four romance
books that had been her favorites and got rid of the rest.
I didn't know Mama was interested in history,
she could imagine Dorrie saying to some neighbor or friend of hers as her Civil War histories and World War II books went out to the Salvation Army pile. As if she was ignorant just because she'd never finished school.
Look at this half-finished dress,
she imagined Dorrie saying as she sorted through her sewing closet. She gathered up the pieces of material with the patterns still pinned on and packed them in boxes for the pickup, along with the rest of the patterns and yards of fabric she had never managed to make anything from.

She sorted through her towels and linens. Got rid of all the recipes and cookbooks. Dorrie had never bothered to learn to cook. There was no reason to think she ever would. She halted briefly when she came to the photographs in the den but finally saved the ones of Dorrie when she was a baby and the one she had of her mother. She got rid of everything else—the few from her girlhood. She'd long ago thrown out her wedding photos and the pictures of herself and Tommy.

She had already cleaned out the basement and the storage closets. She had thrown out bushels of old paper work, everything but her insurance policy, the deed to the house, and the title to the car. Now she made an envelope for Dorrie and put her birth certificate and old school report cards inside it. All her assets were in the First National Bank, and when she was gone Dorrie would get it all. Not that she would appreciate it. She had never appreciated any of the sacrifices Noreen had made for her or realized all the pain she had caused. Why should she start now? Noreen threw away her marriage license and the divorce decree. Heaven only knew why she had saved them in the first place.

She found Dorrie's violin and sheet music and felt her mouth hardening in anger. She couldn't look at a fiddle without thinking of Tommy. He played the fiddle like he'd been born with one in his hands. He could make it sing and cry, and she had loved that about him, she realized with a burst of pain she had thought she was incapable of feeling. It was he who had taught his daughter
to play. He'd enrolled her in lessons from the time she was big enough to stand and had carried her clear across town to some woman who taught children too young to read. He'd had to put in eight hours of overtime every month down at the garage to pay for them, but he'd bragged on her and set her out in front of whoever came over.

“Play your violin, baby,”
he would say over Noreen's objections that he was spoiling her and swelling her head.

But even Noreen had to admit Dorrie had been talented. She probably could have played concerts or in some orchestra, but when Tommy left, the lessons had stopped. Noreen was certainly not going to pay for them. She had all she could do to keep bread on the table. Not one penny did she see from Tommy. Not one dime, she told herself, feeling a little better. Dorrie had cried and taken on at first, but finally she'd stopped. The violin had sat here with the old sheet music and the pictures of the recitals. Noreen felt a little twinge of something but quickly smothered it with a load of blame. It was his fault for leaving. She had done the best she could. She hesitated for a minute but finally left the violin and music alone, although her fingers were itching to add them to the burning barrel.

When she finished sorting through everything, she unhooked her oxygen line, left the tank inside, and hauled out the last sack of papers and photos to the burning barrel. The sky was just beginning to lighten, giving her familiar backyard a gray overcast look. Even here things were in order. Last week she had paid the neighbor boy far more than he deserved to mow a dead lawn, pull the weeds out of the flower beds, and haul away the contents of the garage. Nothing was left in it but her garden spades and snow tires. She squirted the lighter fluid onto the mass of papers in the bin in a forceful stream, carefully set down the can, then threw in the match. Yellow flames shot up, along with a mournful tongue of black smoke that gradually dissipated into a cloud of ash. It snowed down upon her head, irritated her eyes, and stuck
in her throat. She stood there for nearly half an hour feeding the flames.