Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (2 page)

We all instinctively wanted the strangers who were already on their way to find our mother as presentable in death as she had always been in life, and so Conrad had agreed to stay behind to prepare the body, to change her clothes and the bed linens. He and his wife, Janet, the doctors, doing what nurses do in order to protect the shell, the empty shape, the idea of our mother from even the slightest tinge of scorn or even simply the rote disregard the attendants might have brought to their work. He’d cried doing
it. Readying her to be taken away had been his moment of realization, his genuine goodbye.

There was a moment when I found myself alone with her in the room. Had I crept back down to steal a last look, or had we all agreed to give one another that much? It’s been twenty years now. I’ve forgotten so much that I once forbade myself to forget, but I do remember this: snipping five or seven strands of her hair with a pair of nail scissors from her bureau. Just a few short hairs from the nape of her neck. Suddenly, those few strands, things I’d have once thought nothing of brushing off her shoulders or discarding from among the tines of a hairbrush, were consecrated, a host. For a moment, I contemplated eating them, but then they’d be gone and I’d have been left with nothing, so I placed them in a small plastic bag, the kind of bag in which spare threads or extra buttons are provided when you purchase a sweater or coat, and tucked that into the flap of my address book.

I

MY BOOK HOUSE

T
he hallway leading to my parents’ bedroom was lined with oak bookshelves my father built. Simple, sturdy work upon which stretched decades’ worth of school-bus-yellow
National Geographic
magazines, and the stern brown spines of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
dating from before my birth. On a low shelf there was a frayed blue-and-green twelve-volume set of nursery rhymes and children’s tales called
My Book House
in which my sister Jean had written her name over and over in large, teetering letters. It was an antique from the 1940s, and in one of the early volumes there was a story called “Little Black Sambo.” Sambo was depicted as a dark-skinned pickaninny running around the bush of Africa. My parents laughed at the story in the way people laugh about something that was once incendiary but has since run out of force, and yet I gathered that that particular laughter also had something to do with why we never, ever ate at the restaurant in our town called Sambo’s.

There were the books my father would forever push me to read:
Kidnapped, Gulliver’s Travels, Ivanhoe
, and the ones I eventually came to discover on my own, books I’d disappear into for days at a time:
Black Beauty, Anne of Green Gables. To Be Young, Gifted and Black
stood beside
Yes I Can
, by Sammy Davis, Jr. (which I remember poring over one morning when I was eight; everyone else was still asleep, and I read it while eating plate after plate heaped with
my mother’s Alabama lemon cheese layer cake, with its lemon curd and fluffy coconut icing). There were dime-store mysteries and my father’s science-fiction paperbacks and chaste 1950s teen romances alongside
The Sonnets of William Shakespeare
and
The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
. Joke books and cookbooks. Books whose titles appeared to be in the midst of conversation:
Man-child in the Promised Land
beside
Stranger in a Strange Land
beside
Be My Guest
, by hotelier Conrad Hilton. And right below them, a yard or so of Reader’s Digest Abridged Classics, squat little books into which three hefty novels had been scaled down and squeezed together for quick consumption. All of them snugly in place and restful, having made their peace with one another in a past that predated me.

I always assumed that our father was responsible for gathering most of those volumes. He was the one I imagined sending stacks of perforated order forms off to the book clubs, the one who’d sit down in the evenings with the
Reader’s Digest
or stretch out on the couch with a pipe and a science-fiction paperback. But our mother must have read them, too. She’d been a teacher once, before I was born. Mostly now what she seemed to read was her Bible or the palm-sized Christian devotional magazine that came once a month,
Our Daily Bread
. There were some of her books on the shelves, I’m sure of it, books on child rearing and theology, but the majority of what sat there spoke to my father’s sense of the world—or the world as he’d like us to know it: a vast and varied place full of mystery and order, just those two forces working together and upon each other in ceaselessly fascinating ways. For our mother, those same two forces were sides of the one and only God,
I Am That I Am
. For our father, they were tied up in physical laws that could be located everywhere: in the animal kingdom, the
human body, the endless darkness of space. Did he see them in the world of people, too, I wonder? Were they the laws that informed what one person did to another, be it hurtful or kind? When he’d enlisted in the service at eighteen and left the South, had he been fleeing a mystery that had gotten the better of him or seeking a new and better order?

Dad had become an engineer in the air force. He’d been to Europe and Asia on his tour of duty and had brought emblems of those places home for the rest of us to turn over in our hands or stow away in the china cabinet among the holiday dishes. He came back from Thailand six months after I was born with a reel-to-reel player and mahogany-encased hi-fi component set. On Saturdays after I was old enough to talk, I’d beg him to queue up the big machine and sit beside me listening to
Camelot
or
The King and I
, while the giant spools spun slowly around like the eyes on a robot. I wonder if those were the only recordings we had or if I simply liked being swept up in the fantasy that my father and I were members of the same royal court.

Most every faraway thing we knew of or possessed had been filtered to us through our father, and I, for one, came to think of him as a character from the books he collected—someone out of Dickens or Thackeray who had fled a humble past and made himself anew, led off by his curiosity and the wish for adventure and kept aloft by his wits, his innumerable gifts. The fact that he spent most of his days just a few miles away at the air force base and that he’d come home to us every night, never once picking up and taking off like the characters in books often do, didn’t deter my sense of him as a citizen of the world. Whenever I came upon my father sitting alone with his head cocked up to that place where thoughts originate, I’d imagine he was retreading his steps through faraway
cities or stitching himself into a dream of some other life in a place that didn’t exist yet in words. As I got older, I’d sometimes puzzle over whether it was unrest that held him there in what seemed to be ponderous distraction, but never did I ask him. I preferred to keep the idea of him, at least for myself, as something of a mystery.

I felt large, coming from a man like that. I’d watch him move through our house, watch him arrange a pillow behind his back and stretch out his legs beside him on the couch like a king. “Catch me a glass of water,” he’d call toward the kitchen, and when it appeared, I’d watch the liquid transformed into might as it disappeared down his throat. When he lay down on his back, his chest and abdomen rising and falling with rhythmic sleep, I remember reclining atop, weighting him to the world with my small body and listening to his great heart rumbling beneath my ear.

When the air force sent our father out of town on temporary duty, I’d crawl into bed at night beside my mother. My brothers and sisters had done the same thing until they got too big to do so, by which time I was just starting to toddle around underfoot. Sometimes, I’d wonder if my mother had had me so long after she’d given birth to the others simply because she’d wanted another baby around the house, someone to cuddle up with and coo to and carry around like a living doll. When she was mine like that, I’d sit up against the pillows beside her, wanting to chat and giggle, zooming through the details of my afternoon and my wishes for the days and weeks ahead. Or I’d lie beside her and listen while she talked on the phone with one of her sisters back East—conversations during which her voice took on a different timbre, where she’d suck her teeth or let out a quick guttural
hmph
or burst into throaty laughter at a comment that would have struck me as nonsense. When that other voice coaxed her to travel the distance
back to the old days down South, she’d let slip a phrase like “ain’t that a blip,” and then, anticipating my reproach, cast me a look meant to say,
Don’t worry; I know
ain’t
isn’t a word
. After she hung up, if I asked, she’d give me enough of a synopsis so that I could understand some of what they’d been talking about, even if my grasp of who was who in her enormous family remained loose. And then she’d lead me in a bedtime prayer for all of them in her great big raucous clan. Perhaps she wanted to make sure I learned all of their names, or perhaps she would have done so silently anyway:
Please bless Aunt Evelyn, Aunt Ursula, Aunt Gladys, and Aunt Lucille and Aunt June
and on and on until, eventually, their names became a kind of song.

All eight of her sisters, with their thick dark hair and their exquisite perfumes, were for the longest time only a vague collage of incomplete impressions in my mind. The smell of something cooking on a gas stove or the matching chintz drapes and sofa in someone’s living room. A skinny, pull-down stairwell leading up into the attic where someone else had set up her sewing. Candy bowls and plates of cookies. An unguarded, gut-bucket laughter spilling over into the wee hours of night. They belonged to a world that felt almost completely foreign to me, though I also knew that I somehow belonged to it, that I could claim it as my heritage, that those men and women were people I carried inside me, too, even if I couldn’t yet recognize them. What would it take for me to learn my way around in that labyrinth of voices and the knowledge they all seemed to rise up from, a knowledge that almost always rode in on laughter—even the dark, dry laughter a story like “Little Black Sambo” conjured?

Often before saying good night, my mother and I would read a chapter together from
Little Visits with God
, a book of stories
about children put into situations in which something must be decided. Small decisions affecting girls in pedal pushers and Mary Janes or clean-cut boys with sharp creases down the fronts of their pants. I loved the ritual of lying beside my mother and working through the chapters with names like “How to Treat Mean People” or “Smile Before Sundown,” thinking how truly simple it was, when it really came down to it, to do what is right. I remember being absorbed by one drawing of a girl holding a box of cookies, stuck in a quandary about whether to share them. I found it easy enough to race ahead and determine what should be done in most of the book’s scenarios. Instead of suspense,
Little Visits
promised something different. The allure of that bounty of cookies—were they peanut butter? Chocolate chip? The protagonist’s pressed jumper and shiny 1950s shoes, like emblems of a world in which perfection was the likeliest of all outcomes, a world in which children ran from house to house under the clear blue sky, listening, eventually if not at first, to a calm and clear voice telling them what to do, how to be, a voice that watched over them, guarding against harm. A world a child could grasp and parse and line up confidently in her mind before drifting off to sleep. “Stand perfectly still!” a father called out to his daughter in a different chapter. Obeying him, the girl averted being bitten by a snake hiding in tall grass. A world built to a child’s scale, whose mysteries stood within a child’s grasp, and revealed themselves at a child’s request.

I doubt my mother believed the world was that simple, that transparently clear, but it strikes me as logical that she would have wanted me to see it that way, at least for a time. It strikes me as logical that she would have wanted me to obey the voice of my father and to equate it with the voice of God, commanding, “Stand perfectly still!” or “Come here this instant,” with an infallible authority.
It strikes me as logical that she might have wanted me to live awhile in a world governed by such certainty and to take the confidence and the faith imparted by that world with me into the real world, once the time for such passage arrived.